Welcome back, everyone.
I hope you enjoyed the cause so far we have reached out to a very interesting lecture now.
We are going to understand the stages in ethical hacking now.
Why it is important.
It is important because that way you get the idea that you are on track.
You can be able to analyze every every attack, every penetration, every hacking faced by faces.
Just like any activity.
You need a kind of orientation.
You need an approach.
You need activity to be done in phases.
Right.
And that's exactly true for ethical hacking as well.
In order to make this make this broad or the process of ethical hacking.
Easy to understand.
Let me take an example for this.
Let's understand these Seijas stages in the Endecott hacking with one thing, I suppose, and on Army
Army commander has been assigned to attack an army location.
OK, this comes, I mean, to say the enemy location, the target location, basically.
So now you will be angry that he can't he can't straight away, straight away go along with that as
army and attack with its weapons.
Right.
What is really needed for this planning?
But the detail number of people on the enemy location, on the target location, you also need to have
information about the target location.
Right.
You also need to have a, you know, kind of weaknesses for the target.
You need to know at what time the security guards are really available or maybe the the the person who
is on the civilians is available or what time there is a handoff between them and what are the weakest
spot and any moment of your time at any any location in the target location.
Right.
So in that case, what what's the safest way to penetrate and to the target location?
These are all things needed for you to have a specific target, specific attack on the target location.
Right.
So let's get it started.
Let's first understand the first very first stage, that information gathering, information gathering
in the stage.
We simply understand the target being the being the hacker.
We we basically need to collect information about the target, such as IP address, subnet, DNS information,
information about the hosting in case its target is the Web application.
If it is the target machine, then we need to know about which operating system it could be.
If it does the heavy application, we need to know about what what what version of software or database
or web application or APSA was he's running with.
And now, depending on the target, the reconnaissance information varies.
Reconnaissance is basically a way of way of getting the information about the target, its information
and information gathering technique on some of the best tool, I would say, to understand, in fact,
the best tool that you can actually start with is basically the Google search.
You can simply simply go to the Google search and do some research on the target application and get
some helpful information that would be useful to at least get the idea about what the IP address of
the application and all of those stuff.
Right.
Then I'll teach you as we go further.
Some of there are some other tools as well.
The there could be will be making use of some tools like Shodan will be using making use of Annetts
lookup as well for who is lookup as well.
That's the basic tool which is already in the second phase is the scanning.
Now scanning is pretty, pretty important phase over here.
Let's go back to our real world example.
That's the that's where the army commander is now all set.
But it's reconnaissance, his information gathering stage, where he collected all the information about
the target.
But that's not really enough because he need to know the best way to enter the premises.
Right.
They need to know what's the best path he can enter, but he need to know about any weaknesses, any
loopholes in the target machine and similarly in the hacking as well.
Scanning, please help us to understand the way we get into the target.
So it's all about finding the vulnerabilities.
It's all about finding the weaknesses into the target location so that we can use and get the access
into.
Right and some of the some of the information which might help us for this phase would be open ports,
active, active host application or maybe vulnerable applications as well and softer versions as well.
So these information would be needed and this would be collected in the phase of scanning.
All right.
So this third phase is the exploitation.
Now, this is where we actually perform over attack.
This is the phase where we actually perform our real attack.
OK, let's come back to our real world example.
Now, our army commander is all set for that.
Now we know the best way to enter nowe with the help of scanning, with the help of information gathering
stage, we know what's the best path to what's the best route we can get in order to enter into the
target location.
Right.
So now we we just need to launch the attack with my army, I mean, with the army and the weapons as
well.
And this stage, ethical hacker force choose the right kind of attack.
And in the in the ethical hacking world, it could be your malware, it could be a payload and choosing
the right method to deliver it, choosing the right method to deliver that malware or payload into the
network.
And that's the exploitation.
All right.
And there will be multiple tools that we would be we would be making use of.
It could be my best point, which is the free open source platform.
That's the beef as well, which is a browser exploitation framework.
And there are many others.
But these are some of the most popular tool and freely available as well and will be making use of it.
The four stages, maintaining the access sometime it might it might take some time to achieve our objective
while we are in the target system.
Right.
And as an ethical hacker as well, this is completely true.
We might have to go away and come back or maybe maybe in the target system we need to be stay into the
system for a prolonged period.
Also, if the system goes through, the target system, goes offline and comes online, we need to do
we need to have a persistent a sneaky access to the system.
And in order to achieve the desired objective, we need to have we need to keep our access sustainable.
We need to have our connection persistent enough.
So that's why maintaining the access is very, very important in that case.
And at the end, we have a clearing out process.
Right.
So this is very, very important because if we talk about a real world example of a commander might
have or might have, might have successful.
Right.
He might be might might have been successful enough in getting his mission accomplished.
But can he just come back with his team just like the way he.
And the answer is no.
But he can't simply leave all the information related to the operation, otherwise it can be gone before
it can be a confidentiality issues for for the for these commander of the army activity as well.
So some of the best hackers are those who are untraceable.
All right.
That means once they complete their activity, they'd remove all the traces.
They removed everything that could be found to be a witness that can be found while while the well,
the forensics really happen.
So that's a really, really important phase in a way.
Not this.
This is the five very, very important phases as a part of ethical hacking.
And usually, you know, in a process in woman, there could be one more phase as well, which could
be reporting.
That's where whatever you have done, whatever the weaknesses you have collected or where you have been
you where you have been successful enough and exploiting the network, you put all those information
in your report and share it with your client.
Right.
So this is this all becomes a useful for your client so that he can make use of those information to
fix the vulnerability.
All right.
I hope this was useful for you in the next lecture onwards.
Will understand more about the planning and.
Information gathered in stages that we have just talked about in the individual faces, tell them,
keep learning and we'll see you again.
Thank you.