Hands-on Hacking Essentials

Training methods

Trainers will engage participants with lectures, live attack demonstrations and practical examples followed by individual hands-on exercise scenarios. Course is interactive, practical, and besides active participation also full of attack stories that help to change the perspective and understanding of real life security threats.

Intented outcome

During the 2 day hands-on course experience the participants should form a good understanding of current attacker tool-set, attack types and methods. By experiencing the attacker mindset and point of view via hands-onexercises the participants not only will gain much higher appreciation for attack threats, but will be much more alert and better prepared for their own IT systems defence and security testing.

Ideology of this course

The main differences between hacking and penetration testing are the intent and (imposed) limitations. Therefore, the idea behind this training is to see practical information security from the attacker's or "opposing team's" point of view and to deliver first-hand experience or running attacks.

Although this course is highly technical and extensively hands-on, all scenarios are built so that with the help of hints or even full HOWTO's from the scoring server, everyone can complete all exercises regardless of prior 1337 skills or experience level with various operating system.

Everyone will walk through the phases of an attack until successfully pWning various systems and services. There are plenty of attack scenarios to play through and to complete scored objectives. Since the expected participants' skill and experience level is varying to a large degree, we cover a mix of *nix and Windows world and focus on explaining key concepts and on showing the real attack even to those who have never compiled or launched any exploits before.

Contents of the training:

Introduction - The attacker point of view. Intro to the scoring server and virtualized training environment.

Reconnaissance and information gathering - banner grabbing, fingerprinting, service mapping, port- & vulnerability scanning. Finding vulnerabilities, suitable exploits and staging your attacks.

Privilege escalation - local privilege escalation tricks and exploits, password cracking, fun with meterpreter and Armitage features, etc.,)

"Jumping the (fire)wall" - using targeted client-side attacks to gain foothold behind firewalls, pivoting your attacks through the initial compromised workstation, escalating, dumping password hashes, pilfering, passing-the-hash, credential and plaintext password harvesting with browser tools, Mimikatz and WCE, planting backdoors, exfiltrating data, evading Anti-virus products and making a general nuisance of yourselves in the process of 0wning internal networks.

Kali Linux - all hands-on activity takes place on this popular penetration testing distro. Each student has his own Kali Linux with individual target networks cloned in the training environment.

Remote exploitation - attacking various operating systems (both *nix & Windows) and common services (like FTP, SSH, HTTP/S, etc.,) remotly, compiling and running exploits and using ready-made tools.

Attack Toolsets - Metasploit Framework & meterpreter, Armitage (essentially a point-and-click front-end for Metasploit).

Day 2: "Network Takeover" scenario - putting it all together in a whole day hands-on scenario that walks participants through a small company network takeover scenario from an attacker's perspective. Mostly Armitage along with other tools on Kali Linux will be used for attacking, making it easy to track and visualize how the victim network and subnets reveal themselves as participants hack deeper into the network.