HACKING METHODOLOGY: A brief Idea

Let us see what hacking mean in computer terminology: It is achieving access to a computer or computer network without legal authorization.

For hacking any computer on a network it is mandatory that Hacker’s computer should be on same network or some kind of alternate networking structure must be present between them. Means if your computer is without any network (means stand alone) then you are safe.

Hacking is illegal as per Cyber Law of almost all country so never try to be a hacker but at least know the outlines, to safeguard ourself.

Steps of Hacking Methodology

1.    FOOTPRINTING:     This is first step - objective is to obtain target address range, naming acquisition and information gathering that is essential to surgical attack. The key here is not to miss any details. The systematic foot printing of an organisation will allow attackers to create a complete profile of an organisation’s security structure.

• Step1: Determine the scope of activities: It is to decide whether there is a need to footprint full organisation or a subsidiary or single locations.
• Step2: Network Enumeration: It is to identify domains names and associated networks related to a particular organisation.
• Step3: DNS interrogation: After identifying all associated domains, you can begin to query the DNS.
• Step4: Network reconnaissance: After identifying potential network of the organisation, next step is to determine their network topology as well as potential access paths into the network.

2.    SCANNING:    This comes after footprinting - objective is for bulk target assessment and identification of listening services, focussing the attacker’s attention on the most promising avenues of entry.

In this procedure Operating System detection is one of the important for detecting vulnerability on target hosts.

If foot-printing is equivalent to casing a place for information, the scanning is equivalent to knocking on the walls to find all the doors and windows.

3.    ENUMERATION:    It is for more intrusive probing to identify valid user accounts or poorly protected resource shares. It is the process to extract valid user account or exported resource name from systems. These techniques are operating system specific.

4.    GAINING ACCESS:    It is to - use the gathered data for making an informed attempt to access the target.

• The enumerated data is looked for default accounts, misconfigured services or software. The packages installed are looked up in vulnerability databases.
• A telnet session is then initiated to guess password or tools can be employed for automated guessing. The exploited software is then tried upon leading to access on the system.

5.    ESCALATING PRIVILEGES:    The objective is to increase the user level access to complete control over the system.

• Utilities like getadmin and sechole, pwdump2 can then be used to obtain the administrator privileges.
• A sniffer can be installed and the data filtered to yield encrypted passwords, which can be enacted upon by password crakers like LOPHTCRACK etc to yield passwords, which are then used.

6.    PILFERING:    The objective is to gain access to trusted systems by information gathering. Once Administrator equivalent status has been obtained, attackers typically shift their attention to grabbing as much information as possible that can be leveraged for further system conquests.

7.    COVERING TRACKS:    It is to hide the fact of total ownership from the system administrator by erasing all tracks from logs.

The auditing feature can be disabled, or scripts can be copied that automatically erase all presence of the intruder from the logs of the system, making the intruder invisible to the administrators and also to make all future logins non-auditable.

8.    CREATING BACKDOORS:    The objective is to lay trap doors in various parts of the system so as to ensure easy privileged access. Last on the intruder’s checklist is the creation of future opportunities to return to the compromised system, hopefully disguised from the purview of system administrators.

9.    DENIAL OF SERVICE (DoS):    The objective is to use the readily available exploit code to disable a target. Essentially, a Dos attack disrupts or completely denies service to legitimate users, networks, systems or other resources. The intent of any such attack is usually malicious in nature and often takes little skill because of the requisite tools is readily available.

Type of DoS Attack

a)    Bandwidth consumption.

b)    Resource starvation.

c)    Programming flaws.

d)    Routing and DNS attacks.