July 2025
Intermediate to advanced
482 pages
16h 19m
English
Content preview from Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) Study Guide
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 13. Artificial Intelligence for the Ethical Hacker
The future is terrifying. Or at least that’s the lesson of the 1984 blockbuster movie The Terminator, set in a future in which an artificial intelligence called Skynet becomes sentient and immediately declares war on the human species. It sends a sentient robot called a Terminator back in time to wreak havoc and prevent the birth of one of humanity’s future war leaders. During the movie, one of the protagonists—a human named Kyle Reese—tells Sarah Connor, “It [the Terminator] can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop…ever…until you are dead!”1 Hijinks occur throughout, and a lot of really cool practical special effects are employed, until at the end of the movie we see the Terminator’s goals…crushed.
I bring this movie up because it ushered in an era of abject terror regarding computing power and, especially, artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, the period from the mid-1980s through somewhere in the early to mid-1990s is referred to as the “AI winter,” because funding and research on AI, which had been steadily progressing for years, suddenly dried up. No one seemed to want to invest in AI anymore. Did this movie change the course of technological innovation? Nobody I’ve read seems to correlate the two, but to me it’s as obvious as bourbon pouring into a glass at the end of a chapter. (Or was that at the beginning?)
As I write this, ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.