Books and Articles by Kevin Beaver

Staying safe online starts with knowing you're a target—because that mindset changes how you act. This cheat sheet breaks down practical ways to protect your devices and data, spot social engineering tricks before they fool you, build a security-aware culture at work, and even explore the tools professionals use to test password strength.

Not all hacking is bad. The security testing covered in this book reveals security weaknesses in your overall network environment. This Cheat Sheet provides you with quick references to tools, offers tips, and alerts you to commonly exploited targets — information you need to make your security testing easier.

Hackers use a variety of means to gain passwords. One of the most common ways for hackers to get access to your passwords is through social engineering, but they don’t stop there. Check out the following tools and vulnerabilities hackers exploit to grab your password. Keystroke logging One of the best techniques for capturing passwords is remote keystroke logging — the use of software or hardware to record keystrokes as they’re typed.

Websites and applications are notorious for taking practically any type of input, mistakenly assuming that it’s valid, and processing it further. Not validating input is one of the greatest mistakes that web developers can make and one of the finest tools in a hackers toolkit.Several attacks that insert malformed data — often, too much at one time — can be run against a website or application, which can confuse the system and make it divulge too much information to the hacker.

As part of mapping out your network before performing security testing or an ethical hack, you can search public databases and resources to see what other people know about your systems. WHOIS lookups The best starting point is to perform a WHOIS lookup by using any one of the tools available on the internet. In case you're not familiar, WHOIS is a protocol you can use to query online databases such as DNS registries to learn more about domain names and IP address blocks.

One way to begin planning an ethical hack on your business is through a process often called footprinting. Through footprinting, you see what others can see about your organization and systems. Here is the process for footprinting: Gather public information The amount of information you can gather about an organization’s business and information systems is staggering and widely available on the internet.

As with practically any IT or security project, you need to plan security testing. And, since it's been said that action without planning is the root of every failure, strategic and tactical issues in vulnerability and penetration testing need to be determined and agreed on in advance.To ensure the success of your ethical hacking efforts, spend time planning for any amount of testing, from a simple OS password-cracking test against a few servers to a penetration test of a complex web environment.