Product: 0124116442

The book is very readable compared to other technical books. The writer is clearly a teacher who understands how to keep a reader’s attention while providing useful, real world information. As of now, this book seems very up-to-date. It as published recently and has what I have read in other resources are commonly used tools in the industry.

I read the whole book and took copious notes due to my upcoming certification tests and interest in hacking. I used the tools in at least the 1st half of the book. I will update this review once I use the tools listed in the 2nd half of the book. As the book recommended, I downloaded Oracle VMWare, Kali-Linux and Metaspoitable. Don’t be intimidated by these tasks -> Oracle VMWare is a piece of cake to install, and booting up two machines with Kali (which is the attacking machine) and Metasploitable (the woefully unprotected target machine) are pretty simple, too. All of these products are free. Preparing this test bed is your key to understanding and enjoying much of the material in this book. It also allows you to ‘own’ a system pretty simply, so you can get a feel for the core tasks in hacking.

As an example of success using tools and instructions in this book, I used nmap, a scanner, from the Kali virtual machine against the Metasploitable virtual machine, determined a vulnerability and associated exploit, and built and executed it using Metasploit, an exploit development and delivery platform. I consider this my first hack, and although it was made a breeze to do for the sake of learning as quickly as possible, I am still proud!!! It might be awhile before I give a presentation at Defcon, though ;-)

I have been a database developer for twenty years, working in various industries such as human resources, benefits and government, so I am not new to programming, but I think someone without programming training or experience should do fine with this book. The certifications I will be taking are Certified Ethical Hacker and Offensive Security Certified Professional.
Rating: 5
0124116442
Count: 5