Hacking For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Introduction

Welcome to Hacking For Dummies, 2nd Edition. This book outlines — in plain English — computer hacker tricks and techniques that you can use to assess the security of your own information systems, find security vulnerabilities, and fix the weaknesses before criminal hackers and rogue insiders have an opportunity to take advantage of them. This hacking is the professional, aboveboard, and legal type of security testing — which I call ethical hacking throughout the book.

Computer and network security is a complex subject and an ever-moving target. You must stay on top of it to ensure that your information is protected from the bad guys. That's where the tools and techniques outlined in this book can help.

You can implement all the security technologies and other best practices possible, and your information systems may be secure — as far as you know. However, until you understand how malicious attackers think, apply that knowledge, and use the right tools to assess your systems from their point of view, you can't get a true sense of how secure your information really is.

Ethical hacking — which encompasses formal and methodical penetration testing, white-hat hacking, and vulnerability testing — is a necessary requirement to help validate that information systems are truly secure on an ongoing basis. This book provides you with the knowledge required to successfully implement an ethical hacking program along with countermeasures that you can implement to keep malicious hackers ...