-: Now, as I promised you,
this course is going to be highly practical.
But I also promised that I will not neglect the theory.
Now, what we mean by hacking
is being able to gain access to a system
that you're not supposed to have access to.
So for example, logging into an email account
that you're not supposed to have access to
is considered hacking that account.
Gaining access to a remote computer
that you're not supposed to have access to
is hacking that computer.
Reading information that you're not supposed
to be able to read, again, is considered hacking.
So you can see that there is a large number of ways
to hack into a system, and the word hacking
can refer to a number of things,
but the main concept is the same,
gaining access or being able to do things
that you're not supposed to be able to do
is considered hacking.
Now, there are three main types of hackers.
We have the black-hat hackers,
these are the bad people that hack systems illegally
in order to steal money,
or to achieve their own illegal goals.
The second part of hackers are the white-hat hackers.
So this is us, these people use the same techniques
used by the black-hat hackers,
and they also hack into systems.
But they only hack into systems
that they have permission to hack
in order to test the security of the systems.
And finally, we have the gray-hat hackers.
These are a mixture of the two,
so they'll hack into any system,
even if they don't have permission
to test the security of the system.
But they will never steal money or damage that system,
and in most cases, they'll go ahead
and tell the administrator of that system.
But what they do is still illegal
because they test the security of systems
that they do not own, or do not have permission to test.
Now, one big question that people always ask is why hacking?
Why teach or learn hacking?
Well, hacking is an existing industry,
there are lots of job opportunities for ethical hackers,
for people like us, who would go ahead
and test the security of systems
to make sure that these systems are secure
and not vulnerable to black-hat hackers.
There is actually a huge demand
for ethical hackers these days
because of the increased amount of hacking attacks.
So we hear on the daily big systems
and big companies are getting hacked.
Not so long ago, Uber got hacked,
and information of more than 56 million users were exposed.
So companies like Uber, Facebook, and Google,
they hire hackers in order to try
and hack into their systems,
and tell them where the weaknesses are
so that they can fix it.
They also have bug bounty programs
where they literally ask all the hackers around the world
to go ahead and try to hack into their websites
and with their web applications, and if they could,
they will pay them a bounty for the bugs that they find.