All right.
We've established that hacking in cyber security is a bad thing.
Ethical hacking a good thing, but hacking a bad thing.
So now that we understand this is something bad, let's go ahead and jump in and talk about what we
see in the industry as the common phases that occur in hacking.
If they're sophisticated, they're going to be in fact, if they have any degree of sophistication,
they're going to be very interested in using a phased approach.
They're going to be professional about it.
They're not just going to download some tool like a script kitty and start firing it off randomly at
your environment.
They are going to use a thoughtful methodology and it typically begins with reconnaissance or recon.
They are going to actively or passively be gaining valuable information against your environment.
So they will want to know layer three IP addresses.
They'll want to know layer two MAC addresses.
They will want to know what service ports you're utilizing.
They will want to know what are those services you're utilizing.
They're going to gain this documentation about your environment.
What's painful about this is I've been instructing for decades in this industry and I beg in my security
classes, I beg students to be, you know, really just hyper conscious of how detailed and how accurate,
how up to date their documentation is.
And they tend not to do this.
And the irony, the painful irony about it is they could go to some of the people that have done attacks
against their network and they can get excellent documentation that those attackers have.
So we don't want to fall into this category.
Actively doing reconnaissance means they're doing things like scanning ports.
They're sending traffic in to our devices and having our devices respond.
The reason this is called active is they're really active in our environment and this is dangerous for
them because we can often catch this.
So we see them doing this.
Hopefully we see them doing this.
And that is the active approach.
Passive is scarier for us because if they're passively doing recon against us, they've probably figured
out a way to eavesdrop.
And now they're capturing our traffic, our packets of traffic, and they're looking at information
inside of those packets that will give them the address, information and things that they need.
So reconnaissance is typically the first phase and be sure you're clear and the differences between
active and passive.
The next phase that we see all the time is a scanning phase, and we're going to actually elaborate
on this.
So we're going to be teaching you about the scanning, but then also the enumeration.
Now, a lot of people consider enumeration just part of scanning, but we're going to break those apart
so that we can really give you detailed information on how this is done in the hacking process.
Scanning might be discovering the ports that are available, and then enumeration is going to be figuring
out the specifics of the services that are available over those ports.
So we'll be breaking, scanning into multiple phases.
But here we just generally from a bird's eye view of this whole discipline, we say it's initially the
active or passive reconnaissance.
Then they'll enter a more active scanning phase.
They'll do enumeration.
They'll gain access.
They'll make sure they can maintain access.
And then they'll work to clear their tracks.
Notice not all hackers are going to possess the level of sophistication to do all of these phases.
Thank goodness.
Thank goodness the world is not made up of hackers that are sophisticated to go through these phases
and to take the time and spend the resources that would be required to do all of this.
But notice and learn these five phases reconnaissance, whether active or passive.
Then scanning.
Then getting into the resources.
Then making sure they can stay in.
Those resources and then trying to clear their tracks so they might be able to, in fact, do it all
over again.
How scary is that?
In fact, part of their maintaining access may have been to install backdoors in Rootkits and various
other bad things that can be used more effectively and efficiently against us in the future.