MY JOURNEY TO ETHICAL HACKING

Greetings everyone
Hope you all are doing well. Today,I will share my journey to ethical hacking,this article will contain probably everything I experienced to become a Hacker.This article is to motivate the beginners and the wannabe future Ethical Hackers,so they can start learning from things that I have experienced throughout my journey. So, everything started due to interest in computers since I was 5 years old. It's a dream of every computer enthuastic to learn more and more about it.Back in 2015,I joined a social media "KIK" (exactly on November 29, 2015),joined some random groups there,I was surprised watching that there are a lot of hackers there,almost in every group.So I thought learning hacking would be a great acheivement,i tired contacting some people who were claiming that they were hackers and can hack into accounts,I spent a long time asking them to Teach me to Hack and what i got in return was their laughs.But one day,I was promoting my youtube channel in a Random group (I had a channel back then named "TECH GUYS"),where you can say was a turning point,I met a person "Ahad",He was the one who suggested me some edits on my youtube to make better videos,By time we were good friends.Finally,I asked him to teach me to hack and he was the one who made me stand on my own legs!He suggested me that no one's gonna help you,you've to learn everything by yourself,As I did.So i decided to go for myself in order to learn something.Whenever I faced problems,Ahad used to help me.

Well, i started googling about how to hack stuff and etc. Like every person,what I got was some weird Facebook hacking softwares that never actually worked.I learned that it was not the way to hack into stuff.The rejections and demotivation always made me keep the passion alive and I kept on search for stuff and I ended up with Phishing attacks and Keylogging.I became familiar with those tricks and found them useful,after successful attempts I started learning more about how these things happen.This was the skill I always wanted to attain.But I found that these were the dead end,in these conditions what I always do is to switch to something else and learn new stuff I did the same and found some posts of people who hacked into websites. I was amazed by seeing how they got controls over an entire website which was a new thing for me I tried googling stuff once again.I found some methods like SQL Injection using which I was able to hack into site’s database where all information is stored including passwords,I learned that technique and found admin credentials but I was not able to go further as passwords were hashed(was not in clear form, was not readable by humans).I left learning about that for a while as I was not able to find the solution,I was the one struggling on my own,I found some online sites which were able to crack hashes like hashkiller and etc.I used them to get into the website and that was the fun part where I got control over a website. What i wanted to do next was to learn more about it like I always do because I wanted to achieve more about what I was doing.I saw some youtube videos and stuff and learned about Shelling,Rooting and compromising Cpanels.After learning all these i was able to hack into websites,computers and accounts.

I started learning more techniques from Google and ended up with books like “Web Application Hacker’s Handbook” & “OWASP Testing Guide v4”. These were the books that were available in PDF form for free. I gave some time to it and studied them. It was really tough for me to learn all those stuff so i learned about how web apps work and about different CMS(Content Management Systems). I wanted to focus more on it so i watched some videos and some conference talks on youtube which gave me a quick push against the penetration testing.

I learned some new attacks and felt that i was in the right place and all i needed was experience so i could learn more(Never wanted the cycle to repeat). Once i got enough experience and knowledge i started training people who were new to cyber security and hacking. It was a quite good time as i learned much from teaching them and it is always satisfying when you are training someone.No matter what position you are today at, just always remember who you were in the past and all you have to do it to help people rise so they can further help people who are down.

To all those hackers,beginners and people who are reading this I’d say that Attain the Skill, Contribute to the community, Help those who are really in need and you will get the satisfaction you never had. Being a Hacker,just make sure to always be on the good side. This isn’t limited to hacking, being on a good side you should also help the community and the people so they can achieve the skill and can learn the positive use of it.

Rising from a normal guy to a Hacker isn’t an easy journey. People will always demotivate you,reject you and will always let you down no matter what.This is the stage which is really difficult to face and that’s the only thing every person should learn is to keep the passion alive and to keep himself up.

Still many people demotivate me by saying you can't do shit but they can never stop me from achieving my goals and can never destroy the passion i have.The people in the community should help each other rather than just making people down and stopping them from achieving their goals. Being a hacker isn’t the important thing,being a successful person is the important thing and that can be only done by helping the community rise.

It is really tough to keep yourself up to date.I’d ask the beginners to focus on self study and learn things by themself as everything is possible all you need is the passion of taking a step after that you can achieve anything. Still the passion is up and i am using my skills to help people getting secure in the cyber space.All i achieved was by doing self-study and self motivation and without any certifications. You are never a perfect person, but you are still better then the rest of the people. For being a Hacker,all it takes is the passion to achieve something. I hope this article helped you motivate to take a positive step in life,Share the article so we can help the community rise 🙂

Kabir Manchanda
Cyber Security Enthusiastic.