CHAPTER 2: HACKING METHODOLOGIES

 

CHAPTER 2: HACKING METHODOLOGIES

 

The process of looking for systems vulnerabilities as well as presenting the evidence of theory attacks to show the vulnerabilities are obvious. Good penetration usually provides suggestions for directing and correcting the issue that was encountered during the analysis, in other terms these techniques are applied to improve the security of the systems against attacks.

The main reason is to identify security issues by applying a methodology, tools and techniques as an attacker. The following are phases of hacking

 

(a)     RECONNAISSANCE

Is the most important phase of the hacking methodology. You can never win a war if you haven't gathered enough information about your enemy. The importance of reconnaissance is to gather information and facts about your target. At this phase each information that is obtained is saved.

At this stage there are two ways of gathering information and this includes.

(i)             Passive – this is where the attacker doesn’t actively engage the system, they gather information based on online information which they might come across

(ii)                Active – this is where the attacker actively engages the system in order to gather information

 

(b)    SCANNING

Is the process of identifying set of active machines, ports and services, discovering operating system architecture of the target, identifying vulnerabilities and threats in the network. Scanning is usually used by hackers to create a profile about the targeted organization.

 

(c)     ENUMERATION

Is the process of extracting user names, machine names, network resources, shares and services from the computer system. Here is where the hacker makes an active connection to the system to perform direct queries to gain more information about the target.

 

(d)    EXPLOITATION

Is the process of executing the attack based on the information that has been gathered in the previous stage. In this stage is where the hacker performs that actual hacking itself using the hacking the tools exposed to him.

(e)     PRIVILEGE EXCALATION

Is the process of obtaining privileges that are granted to higher privileged accounts than the attacker broke into originally. The goal of this step is to move from a low-level account all the way up to the administrator account to have full access and control of the system

 

(f)    PRESENCE MAINTANANCE

Is the process of creating an unknown entrance that will allow you to come back into the system anytime the hackers to come back without being detected, this can be achieved by planting a backdoor on to the system

 

(g)     COVERING TRACKS

Is the process of removing any signs of evidence that you were in the system. The hacker would delete log files and remove any other related evidence that need to be deleted so that the system admin wouldn’t know that the system was attacked.

 

(h)    REPORT WRITING

Is the process of documenting all the findings that you made during your exploitation of the system on how you managed to exploit it, and also recommend some solutions on how they could stop that to occur in the future.