Please note that you can find a searchable version of these notes and the answers to all the tasks on my GitBook page here.

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As your experience level increases, you will find that the things you're researching scale in their difficulty accordingly; however, in the field of information security, there will never come a point where you don't need to look things up.

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Vulnerability Searching

Often in hacking you'll come across software that might be open to exploitation. For example, Content Management Systems (such as Wordpress, FuelCMS, Ghost, etc) are frequently used to make setting up a website easier, and many of these are vulnerable to various attacks. So where would we look if we wanted to exploit specific software?

The answer to that question lies in websites such as:

• ExploitDB

• NVD

• CVE Mitre

NVD keeps track of CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) -- whether or not there is an exploit publicly available -- so it's a really good place to look if you're researching vulnerabilities in a specific piece of software. CVEs take the form: CVE-YEAR-IDNUMBER.

ExploitDB tends to be very useful for hackers, as it often actually contains exploits that can be downloaded and used straight out of the box. It tends to be one of the first stops when you encounter software in a CTF or pentest.

If you're inclined towards the CLI on Linux, Kali comes pre-installed with a tool called "searchsploit" which allows you to search ExploitDB from your own machine. This is offline, and works using a downloaded version of the database, meaning that you already have all of the exploits already on your Kali Linux system!

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Man Pages

One of the many useful features of Linux is the inbuilt man command, which gives you access to the manual pages for most tools directly inside your terminal. Occasionally you'll find a tool that doesn't have a manual entry; however, this is rare. Generally speaking, when you don't know how to use a tool, man should be your first port of call.

We can also use the man pages to look for special switches in programs that make the program do other things.

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Google Dorking

Google has a lot of websites crawled and indexed. We can add operators such as that from programming languages to either increase or decrease our search results - or perform actions such as arithmetic!

Google will interpret everything in between these quotation marks as exact and only return the results of the exact phrase provided...Rather useful to filter through the rubbish that we don't need.

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That’s it for this section. Next one up is the network exploitation basics section.

— Hmad