To the Beginners

To all the Beginners

The metamorphism into a hacker

Welcome to Hackthissite, a non-profit organization intended to teach you about computer security/hacking. Look around the site and you will find Missions to be completed and a well-maintained forum. Take time to read the articles available here and increase your repertoire of knowledge. Feel free to ask, and asking as a script kiddie is a skill in itself which I will cover later.

What is taught here
The main focus on Hackthissite is web hacking and exploitation. For this knowledge of HTML is necessary as it is the bread and butter of things to come. Take time to learn it here:

http://www.w3schools.com/

Have fun doing the challenges, have a determination to learn and you will become a great hacker in no time.

What about hacking in the movies

Movies such as Die Hard 4.0 show hacking as what most teenagers and villains do. This is entirely false as preteens as young as 12 learn and the majority of hackers are “White Hat”. This is a stereotype which many civilians believe hackers are.

Next is the “hacking part” in the movies. You hear them mention about Nmap and there is a certain program opened with black background and white text only with strange code on it. Now this is “Server Rooting,” a very advanced type of hacking. This is hacking into the server and exploitation of the operating system, which takes years of hacking to even get to the “newbie” part of it.

[u]How about the hacking programs online? Do they make me a hacker?[/u]

Most certainly not. There programs are made by hackers, obviously black hat, to infiltrate into the script kiddie community and wreck havoc. What you don’t know is that there may be a line of code in there which makes you contribute to a huge DOS attack.

A hacker can be defined as this:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#attitude

A hacker hacks by exploiting code and hacks manually, not using the program of others. If he needs a program he shall program it himself.

[u]What programming language should I learn? Many people say that I shouldn’t start on BASIC but it’s so simple![/u]

I am a victim of the bad syntax of BASIC. Once you learn BASIC it is very hard to break the bad habit of its syntax. Especially a wide gap as switching from BASIC to C++. However this does not mean it’s a bad language. It still is a programming language but once you master BASIC you should stick to BASIC.

A better start would be Python, Perl or Ruby. These are also high-level programming languages such as BASIC but their syntax is much better. For seconds you should try C/C++. These are quite hard to learn for a beginner so you should master a simpler programming language first.

Why do I always get flamed on the forums when I ask them to hack a website for me? You told me that I should ask!

You were obviously asking wrongly. First here’s an introduction to the most-used forum rule:

Hackthissite shall not support illegal activities.

To ask smart and viable questions read this:

[url] http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#intro[/url]

Now a bad example would be:

Yooz peepz yuz gotza help me 2 hax0r tHis wak0 sitE.

A good example would be:

Hello there,

I’m really new to this site. Could you please kindly explain to me how this PHP exploitation works?

Thanks in advance,
-username here-

Now this is the way to ask smart questions. Don’t ask directly about hacking, just phrase it in an indirect way.

To the light side,
IncandescentLight