Really need help!

Hi, you can start doing the levels of Hackthis for the start and little by little you will learn concepts of “real hacking”
Take a look at Real levels ones

You’re going to want to find a balance in your studies. Learning programming languages is a great start. There is a ton of information to learn, and most people continue to learn even after they’ve become good at a particular area of hacking. Programming will aid you in spotting flaws in code.

Other than programming, challenge sites are a great way to get into the mindset of hacking. You’ll have fun thinking of ways to manipulate the functionality of applications and services. This is one of the best-designed challenge sites around.

You’re right @x2600, finding the correct balance is actually as important as hard when you really enjoy hacking. But studies should always come first.

@WHGhost agreed. Watching youtube videos, reading, and finding places to use what you’ve learned. You can set up environments for testing, or try challence sites.

There are many things that you should observe in aspects to learn hacking. Basically hacking can’t be learned from the books. It’s an art that you learn as start working on it. More you practice more you learn and this really improves your skills.

To the response of what things really important to learn hacking is the programming and a flexible mind. You should be smart and observe every little thing. And make yourself great with programming languages like python.

Where to start with hacking? Well, you can read a highly detailed article about where to start with hacking.

A books are really important. Hacking is like the see, you know it’s huge and full of things to discover, but if you have no one to lead you, you will just pass nearby lots of very interesting stuff without even knowing they exist. You need to be curious, and so to have a way to learn from others. Youtube videos are great, but are not enough, you will need something that goes more in depth, and that’s something videos don’t do well. As @x2600 said, it’s all about finding the balance, but books are a great way to learn.

I agree, you’ll need everything. The only criteria is not the format of the information, but the quality of this information. Reading good books is better than reading bad tutorials or watching bad youtube videos.

Without books the firsts hackers wouldn’t had exist. Electronic books are also books ;)

@micr0n That reminded me of a scene from the movie hackers(1995) where they’re all sitting around discussing technical manuals/books. That is pretty much how things were done back in the day. Little bit of nostalgia, found here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/faq#.2.1.6

Books are may be helpful but to be dependent on books instead of practical work doesn’t give anything all. So for enriching knowledge, books are good source but when it comes to practice then it’s a very slower to help.

I have a few programming/hacking books on my desk, and when I have something to check, I actually prefer to look at them instead of going to my favorite search engine. It’s better most of the time.

There’s something nice about reading something in print.

I would go and start racking up certs.

1. OSWAP
2. A+
3. Security +
4. Network +
5. Project +

(Not in that order necessarily) Knock yourself out.

Are 2-5 comptia certs?

Cpt_Underpants Yes, 2-5 are CompTIA certs. The other one is by Offensive Security. It’s probably the one you should get last.

Yeah the offensive security certs are very tough. I would recommend looking into Comptia security+ as it is very basic and the CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) as I believe it is a very good starting cert. After that there are other certs which I can’t wait to do such as CISSP and OSCP :P

Everybody have their own taste of priorities, some people go with books but some go with the field work.

books and practice are not necessarly different… You can have a theory part in a book, then a practice part. For example: Introduction to modern cryptography, Cryptography Engineering, Practical Malware Analysis, Practical Reverse Engineering, and more…

And some people think they’re done when they crack open a kali linux box. XD

Do you guys have a “every hacker should read this book” you’d recommend?

So true x) For the story, I’ve been at a meetup a few days ago, the speaker was saying that he’ll make a quick explanation on how to crack WEP, someone in the room said “Use Aircrack-ng”

I don’t have recommandations for hacking in general, but if you have a specific topic, I can give you books ^^

I’m trying to think if there are any cult classics. I can think of articles, but I can’t really think of any books.

r4v463 What about a good introduction to how the Internet happened to be and how it works?

I’ll take the link to the articles x2600 :D

Wow, how the Internet happened… I haven’t read any specific books about that, that’s more general culture that you learn in IT class. For their fields, the books that I’ve gave as examples before are very good:

[quote=r4v463]For example: Introduction to modern cryptography, Cryptography Engineering, Practical Malware Analysis, Practical Reverse Engineering, and more…[/quote]

I can add some to them, for example, for the history of cryptography and cryptanalysis, The Code Book of Simon Singh is a really good book, and easy to read. “Hacking, The art of exploitation” might be something that could also interest you.

Ok, thanks, I’ll add them to my list.

You’re welcome ^^. Note that Practical Malware Analysis and Practical Reverse Engineering, are not from-scratch books, so you might consider to acquire some background in those fields before reading them.

As far as articles go, you can find a few here:

http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html
https://www.2600.com/

The reason that I suggest these zines is that I feel it is important to traverse the culture before you get deep into the academics and (especially) practicum. You’ll find a lot of culture in zines. Also, surprisingly, you’ll find quite a bit of relevant information on techniques used today.