Week 1: Embarking on an AI-Driven Cybersecurity Journey

What this week was about?

This week, I officially started my journey to build an AI based around cybersecurity that can potentially be used to pentest real world systems and make systems secure especially as the Internet begins to dominate our everyday lives.

I will be posting weekly blogs to document my journey so please follow along if you are passionate like me about the intersection of cybersecurity and AI.

This week’s goals:

• Enrolled in “The Complete Ethical Hacking Course” by Codestars on Udemy.

• Set up a virtual lab comprising of kali linux, windows, and metasploitable in VMware.

• Learned a few basic concepts regarding networking and the dark web.

What I learned so far:

• How to navigate around kali linux.

• How to run VPN’s and change the DNS server of my virtual machine.

• Why accessing the dark web is important for ethical hackers? - It helps them get ahead of new methods and technologies being used by black hat hackers.

• How to run netdiscover and nmap to find out other devices connected to the same router as me.

• How to launch an ARP spoofing attack against my windows virtual machine.

  

• How to analyze the packets sent by the windows virtual machine when I am the man in the middle.

• How to crack WPA and WPA2 encryption to get the password of my mobile hotspot and home router.

Challenges I faced:

• I was unable to capture other packets apart from ARP packets on wireshark when I was ARP Spoofing the windows machine.

• I was unable to capture the WPA handshake of my mobile hotspot.

How I solved the problems:

• I changed my interface from wireshark to bettercap from which I was able to capture not only ARP packets but other packets as well that contained login passwords and usernames when I tried to log in on an http site on my windows virtual machine.

• In order to capture the WPA handshake, I ran a deauth attack against my mobile hotspot which temporarily disconnected the client (in this case, me) from the hotspot. When the client reconnected, I was able to capture the WPA handshake.

Next Week’s Goals:

• Learn how to capture packets from HTTPS websites.

• Learn the basics of pentesting.

• Carry out pentesting with the help of ChatGPT.

Thanks for reading! I’m just getting started — there’s a lot more to explore, test, and build. Stay tuned for Week 2, where I’ll dig deeper into real-world attack scenarios and start aligning my research toward building the AI system.

Disclaimer:

This blog documents my personal journey in learning ethical hacking and cybersecurity with the intent to build responsible AI tools for penetration testing and system defense.

All experiments are conducted in isolated lab environments on virtual machines I own or control. This project is strictly for educational and ethical purposes.

I do not condone or promote any form of unauthorized or illegal access to systems.