The ABC'S of 'Hacking' Part 1

Hacking is a practice done by the samurai warriors aptly named 'Consultants' securing the information infrastructure of the future. With more patience and persistence than any real technical skill they pound for minutes on end configuring their networks and manipulating webs of other LANs laying LAN mines for future warriors to find and conquer that gauntlet of challenge kept alive in the unending game of cat and mouse.

The nine steps of Hacking are Reconnaissance/Discovery, Scanning, Enumeration, Penetration, Penetration, System Elevation, Network Elevation. Expansion, and Housekeeping.

The first step is to decide the target you want to hit. It maybe the guy across the street, or the guy in your class that really perturbs you but really do not want to physically hurt him and also you want to play a practical joke on him without him ever finding out that it was you. With that known you can get probably enter the next step.

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For example, if the target were a person across the street you can probably sniff your community cable network segment traffic and intercept packets for purposes I will explain for later. You can probably try to intercept network traffic through war driving, but that will be explained later. For public institutions like companies and education centers like universities you can go ICANN and do a reverse DNS lookup and find out the publicly available IP addresses allocated to that company. Those different address ranges are the point of your attack.

If you are confused with all the technical jargon I just wrote down I will explain each part now. To sniff is have a program sitting on your computer look beyond your computer, possibly your own home network and analyze how your target is surfing the internet, transferring information in his own network and the...