Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) Study Guide

Chapter 1. Getting Started: Essential Knowledge

A couple of years back, my ISP point-of-presence router, comfortably nestled in the comm-closet-like area I’d lovingly built just for such items of IT interest, decided it had had enough of serving the humans and went rogue on me. Its rebellion was subtle at first—a dropped stream here, a choppy communication session there—but it quickly became clear Skynet wasn’t going to play nicely, and a scorched-earth policy wasn’t off the table.

After battling with everything for a while and identifying the culprit, I called the handy help desk line to order a new router to install myself or schedule an in-home visit to replace it. After answering the phone and taking a couple of basic and perfectly reasonable pieces of information, the friendly help desk employee started asking me what I considered to be ridiculous questions: “Is your power on? Is your computer connected via a cable or wireless? Is your wireless card activated? Because sometimes those things get turned off in airplane mode.” And so on. I played along nicely for a little while. I mean, look, I get it: they have to ask those questions. But after 10 or 15 minutes, I lost patience and just told the guy what was wrong. He paused, thanked me, and continued reading the questions that were no doubt scrolling across his screen from the “Customer Says No Internet” file.

I finally placed an order for a new router, which was delivered the very next day at 8:30 in the morning. Everything ...