Hacking Essentials Why Knowledge Really Is Power

In the world of hacking, knowledge is literally your power tool. Think of it like this: the more you know about the system or network you’re targeting, the more ways you have to get in. This makes it absolutely essential to do thorough enumeration before attempting any kind of exploitation. You wouldn’t charge into an unknown landscape without a map, right? The same logic applies here.

Getting to Know Your Target: The Landscape

Imagine you're handed an IP address—or a handful of them—and asked to perform a security audit. Before diving in, you first need to get a lay of the land. In hacking, this translates to identifying what services are up and running on these targets. For instance, one IP could be hosting a website, while another might be a Windows Active Directory Domain Controller. To uncover these details, we start with a process called port scanning.

Ports: The Channels of Communication

To understand port scanning, it’s helpful to think of ports as channels through which computers communicate. When a service runs on a machine (like a website), it opens a “door,” or port, to communicate. Think of it like having separate phone lines—each port is a line dedicated to a particular service, like one line for HTTP traffic (port 80) and another for HTTPS (port 443).

For example, if you’ve got a bunch of browser tabs open, your computer knows which tab is loading which site thanks to different ports. Even if it’s the same website, HTTP traffic uses port 80, while the secure HTTPS version uses port 443. This system is what allows computers to juggle multiple connections, each running smoothly without interference.

The Range of Ports: Finding Your Target

Every computer has 65,535 available ports, but only a few of them are typically “standard” ports. Here’s a quick cheat sheet:

Diagram explaining how nmap works

• HTTP Web Services: Port 80

• HTTPS Web Services: Port 443

• NETBIOS (Windows): Port 139

• SMB (Windows): Port 445

However, when you’re working in a Capture the Flag (CTF) environment or in a more complex security scenario, these standard ports can sometimes be altered. That’s why enumeration is so crucial—without knowing which ports are open, successful attacks are a shot in the dark.

First Step in Attacking: Port Scanning

When you’re ready to attack (or audit), port scanning is step one thius is a hacking essentials. This scan is typically done with a tool called nmap. Nmap is widely considered the industry standard for a reason—it’s powerful, it’s versatile, and it can do a whole lot more than simply list open ports.

Nmap works by sending out requests to each port on a target system and observing how each one responds. Based on the responses, it labels each port as open (ready for connections), closed (blocked), or filtered (likely by a firewall). Once you know which ports are open, you can figure out which services are running on each port. This part of enumeration can be done manually, or—more commonly—you can let nmap do the heavy lifting.

Why Nmap? The Swiss Army Knife of Port Scanning

So, why do hackers, pen testers, and security experts choose nmap above all other tools? Put simply, nmap is like the Swiss Army knife of port scanning. It’s packed with features, thanks in large part to its scripting engine. With this engine, you can do a lot more than just scan for open ports—you can search for vulnerabilities and, in some cases, even run specific exploit scripts. While these more advanced techniques are for later on, just remember that nmap is a tool you’ll keep coming back to. For more tips and tricks go to www.masterdynamics365.com and get a more in depth learning course that will have actual commands to run.