How to Hack Like a Ghost takes you deep inside the mind of a hacker as you carry out a fictionalized attack against a tech company, teaching cutting-edge hacking techniques along the way. Go deep into the mind of a master hacker as he breaks into a hostile, cloud-based security environment. Sparc Flow invites you to shadow him every step of the way, from recon to infiltration, as you hack a shady, data-driven political consulting firm. While the target is fictional, the corporation’s vulnerabilities are based on real-life weaknesses in today’s advanced cybersecurity defense systems. You’ll experience all the thrills, frustrations, dead-ends, and eureka moments of his mission first-hand, while picking up practical, cutting-edge techniques for penetrating cloud technologies. There are no do-overs for hackers, so your training starts with basic OpSec procedures, using an ephemeral OS, Tor, bouncing servers, and detailed code to build an anonymous, replaceable hacking infrastructure guaranteed to avoid detection. From there, you’ll examine some effective recon techniques, develop tools from scratch, and deconstruct low-level features in common systems to gain access to the target. Spark Flow’s clever insights, witty reasoning, and stealth maneuvers teach you how to think on your toes and adapt his skills to your own hacking tasks. You'll learn: How to set up and use an array of disposable machines that can renew in a matter of seconds to change your internet footprint How to do effective recon, like harvesting hidden domains and taking advantage of DevOps automation systems to trawl for credentials How to look inside and gain access to AWS’s storage systems How cloud security systems like Kubernetes work, and how to hack them Dynamic techniques for escalating privileges Packed with interesting tricks, ingenious tips, and links to external resources, this fast-paced, hands-on guide to penetrating modern cloud systems will help hackers of all stripes succeed on their next adventure.

Tag along with a master hacker on a truly memorable attack. From reconnaissance to infiltration, you’ll experience their every thought, frustration, and strategic decision-making first-hand in this exhilarating narrative journey into a highly defended Windows environment driven by AI. Step into the shoes of a master hacker and break into an intelligent, highly defensive Windows environment. You’ll be infiltrating the suspicious (fictional) offshoring company G & S Trust and their hostile Microsoft stronghold. While the target is fictional, the corporation’s vulnerabilities are based on real-life weaknesses in today’s advanced Windows defense systems. You’ll experience all the thrills, frustrations, dead-ends, and eureka moments of the mission first-hand, while picking up practical, cutting-edge techniques for evading Microsoft’s best security systems. The adventure starts with setting up your elite hacking infrastructure complete with virtual Windows system. After some thorough passive recon, you’ll craft a sophisticated phishing campaign to steal credentials and gain initial access. Once inside you’ll identify the security systems, scrape passwords, plant persistent backdoors, and delve deep into areas you don’t belong. Throughout your task you’ll get caught, change tack on a tee, dance around defensive monitoring systems, anddisable tools from the inside. Sparc Flow’s clever insights, witty reasoning, andstealth maneuvers teach you to be patient, persevere, and adapt your skills at the drop of a hat. You’ll learn how to: Identify and evade Microsoft security systems like Advanced Threat Analysis,QRadar, MDE, and AMSI Seek out subdomains and open ports with Censys, Python scripts, and other OSINT tools Scrape password hashes using Kerberoasting Plant camouflaged C# backdoors and payloads Grab victims’ credentials with more advanced techniques like reflection anddomain replication Like other titles in the How to Hack series, this book is packed with interesting tricks, ingenious tips, and links to useful resources to give you a fast-paced, hands-on guide to penetrating and bypassing Microsoft security systems.

Follow me on a step-by-step hacking journey where we pwn a high-profile fashion company. From zero initial access to remotely recording board meetings, we will detail every custom script and technique used in this attack, drawn from real-life findings, to paint the most realistic picture possible. Whether you are a wannabe pentester dreaming about real-life hacking experiences or an experienced ethical hacker tired of countless Metasploit tutorials, you will find unique gems in this book for you to try: -Playing with Kerberos -Bypassing Citrix & Applocker -Mainframe hacking -Fileless WMI persistence -NoSQL injections -Wiegand protocol -Exfiltration techniques -Antivirus evasion tricks -And much more advanced hacking techniques I have documented almost every tool and custom script used in this book. I strongly encourage you to test them out yourself and master their capabilities (and limitations) in an environment you own and control. Hack (safely) the Planet! (Previously published as How to Hack a Fashion Brand)

A guide to hacking the human element. Even the most advanced security teams can do little to defend against an employee clicking a malicious link, opening an email attachment, or revealing sensitive information in a phone call. Practical Social Engineering will help you better understand the techniques behind these social engineering attacks and how to thwart cyber criminals and malicious actors who use them to take advantage of human nature. Joe Gray, an award-winning expert on social engineering, shares case studies, best practices, open source intelligence (OSINT) tools, and templates for orchestrating and reporting attacks so companies can better protect themselves. He outlines creative techniques to trick users out of their credentials, such as leveraging Python scripts and editing HTML files to clone a legitimate website. Once you’ve succeeded in harvesting information about your targets with advanced OSINT methods, you’ll discover how to defend your own organization from similar threats. You’ll learn how to: Apply phishing techniques like spoofing, squatting, and standing up your own web server to avoid detection Use OSINT tools like Recon-ng, theHarvester, and Hunter Capture a target’s information from social media Collect and report metrics about the success of your attack Implement technical controls and awareness programs to help defend against social engineering Fast-paced, hands-on, and ethically focused, Practical Social Engineering is a book every pentester can put to use immediately.

There are a thousand and one ways to hack an Active Directory environment. But, what happens when end up in a full Cloud environment with thousands of servers, containers and not a single Windows machine to get you going?When we land in an environment designed in the Cloud and engineered using the latest DevOps practices, our hacker intuition needs a little nudge to follow along. How did the company build their systems and what erroneous assumptions can we take advantage of?This book covers the basics of hacking in this new era of Cloud and DevOps: Break container isolation, achieve persistence on Kubernetes cluster and navigate the treacherous sea of AWS detection features to make way with the company's most precious data.Whether you are a fresh infosec student or a Windows veteran, you will certainly find a couple of interesting tricks to help you in your next adventure.

"There are two kinds of companies: those that have been breached and those that do not know it yet." The company calling us just discovered an anomaly on their most critical systems. Our job is to conduct a deep forensic analysis, perform threat assessment, and uncover all malware programs left by hackers. Digital Forensics We follow the attacker's footprint across a variety of systems and create an infection timeline to help us understand their motives. We go as deep as memory analysis, perfect disk copy, threat hunting and malware analysis while sharing insights into real crisis management. Rebuilding systems Finally, we tackle the most important issues of any security incident response: how to kick the attackers out of the systems and regain trust in machines that have been breached. For those that read hacking books like the "Art of Exploitation" or "How to Hack Like a Pornstar," you finally get to experience what it feels like to be on the other side of the Firewall!

A hands-on guide to hacking computer systems from the ground up, from capturing traffic to crafting sneaky, successful trojans. A crash course in modern hacking techniques, Ethical Hacking is already being used to prepare the next generation of offensive security experts. In its many hands-on labs, you’ll explore crucial skills for any aspiring penetration tester, security researcher, or malware analyst. You’ll begin with the basics: capturing a victim’s network traffic with an ARP spoofing attack and then viewing it in Wireshark. From there, you’ll deploy reverse shells that let you remotely run commands on a victim’s computer, encrypt files by writing your own ransomware in Python, and fake emails like the ones used in phishing attacks. In advanced chapters, you’ll learn how to fuzz for new vulnerabilities, craft trojans and rootkits, exploit websites with SQL injection, and escalate your privileges to extract credentials, which you’ll use to traverse a private network. You’ll work with a wide range of professional penetration testing tools—and learn to write your own tools in Python—as you practice tasks like: Deploying the Metasploit framework’s reverse shells and embedding them in innocent-seeming files Capturing passwords in a corporate Windows network using Mimikatz Scanning (almost) every device on the internet to find potential victims Installing Linux rootkits that modify a victim’s operating system Performing advanced Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks that execute sophisticated JavaScript payloads Along the way, you’ll gain a foundation in the relevant computing technologies. Discover how advanced fuzzers work behind the scenes, learn how internet traffic gets encrypted, explore the inner mechanisms of nation-state malware like Drovorub, and much more. Developed with feedback from cybersecurity students, Ethical Hacking addresses contemporary issues in the field not often covered in other books and will prepare you for a career in penetration testing. Most importantly, you’ll be able to think like an ethical hacker⁠: someone who can carefully analyze systems and creatively gain access to them.