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Title    : How to become elite?
Author(s): Necrose (Necrose.Labs)
Adv. ID  : NRC2K001.TXT
Rl. Date : 28/09/00
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I wrote this document to tell everyone who likes to know how to become a elite
dude because I am sick and tired of all those people who keep asking questions
on IRC or via E-mail like: "Hey, elite person can you teach me how to hack?" or
"Hey, I wanna become a hacker. I read two documents but I don't get it, can you
be my friend and teach me how to hack?". I usually answer them that they should
read a lot, but actually that isn't a good beginning. I wrote this document to
give people a little intro into the world of hacking. I won't actually teach
you how to hack, I will only tell you where to start.

Everyone who wants to hack always starts with downloading lots of text files
about hacking from every hacking/security site they can find. As a matter of
fact I always recommended: reading. To all the people who ever asked me how
to become a hacker. But when I saw some hacking/security sites last week, I got
shocked of the outdated crap that was available in the documents archives
there. The archives contained files which were released a very long time ago
whuch means a lot of the techniques and exploits are so outdated that probably
99% of the vulnerible machines to that techniques and exploites were already
patched a long time ago. But when you are new you wont notice this an you
probably will never get any further until you actually found one good recently
released text file. I won't say that all the information in the text files is
incorrect or outdated, but most of it is. So reading those text files can only
be interesting if you are really looking for a specific technique and it
certainly isn't good to read them if you are new to hacking and still a
beginner who wants to learn the basics about it.

You should start at finding out what you really know about computers and
networks. Do you know what IPv4 is? and what IPv6 is? do you know what PORT's
are? and what packets are? If you don't know this you'll have a long way to
cross before you can become a hacker. You can increase your general computer
knowledge and especially your knowledge about networks by reading books about
it. People often think you won't learn anything from reading simple books but
that isn't true, there are lots of very good books out there which will tell
you the basics about computers and networks.

You'll probably heard of UNIX and you might even have a variant of it installed
like: Linux. Because if you do, that is fine since hacking without a local
installed UNIX variant or a remote shell is almost as good as impossible
because most of the exploits is written for the UNIX platform. I would actually
recommend you to read some books about UNIX/Linux and consider to install it on
your computer. If you don't feel like installing UNIX/Linux at your computer.
You can also try to get a shell account, which will probably be very hard these
days. As long as you know that you can't live without UNIX/Linux if you want to
call yourselves a hacker.

As you could read above a UNIX variant is required to run most of the available
exploits. You'll probably heard about exploits and maybe you downloaded one. If
you run windows. And if you already have UNIX/Linux installed you might have
tried to run it but it probably failed because you dont know enough about the
working of exploits to use them properly. You should find out how to use them
by knowing what they should do. But before you can know exactly what they
should do, you should also have some knowledge about programming languages.
So you can analyse the code and learn from it.

There are a lot of programming languages, but how do you know which you should
learn. I personally recommend to try C and Perl because most of the exploits
are written in one of those two languages and they both have much power. C is
probably the most powerful available programming language in the world. Perl is
easier to learn than C, and is also available on almost every platform.

If you know some more about networks, exploits and programming C and Perl now
you should really try to subscribe into some mailing lists. I personally
recommend you to subscribe at bugtraq, but only if you are sure you know enough
now because if you don't you wont probably understand anything of the
discussions. And if you have some skills now, it is a very good training to
read this discussions and try to understand them which will increse your
knowledge. Bugtraq is also a good resource to keep up to date so you can try
the newest exploits which still have a higher number of vulnerible machines
because patching all the machines costs time. Which means you should use that
time to try out the new exploits which you should analyse and learn from.

If you read the above you probably noticed that becoming a hacker or security
specialist isn't very easy. And the way you'll have to cross to become one is
very long and difficult. But I hope this document gave you the information you
needed to make a beginning into the hacking/security scene.

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Necrose.Labs - Hacking/Security Research
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