Mastering the hacker’s mindset artistically.
Let’s try to understand how I developed a hacker's mindset, and how you can do it too.
So basically, there are these small things you do in your daily life that impact your certain abilities of problem-solving and reasoning. Things like solving puzzles and being curious, and trying to engineer small things' can play a significant role in shaping your abilities towards approaching certain things.
What if you are not that big-time problem solver or that tech wiz?
Speaking honestly if you just set foot in cybersecurity you will automatically develop these habits as you move along and I've certainly experienced that change in my mindset from the time I've started in this field so it's no big deal actually.
The Mindset: How to develop it?
So, I am good at drawing and Sketching, particularly in making portraits,
Sketching is not just about picking up the pencil and drawing random lines on the canvas, or Is it?
A sketch rectifies the patience of its maker and I'm saying this because when I first started it back when I was 8, all I could care of, was to get my drawing to look the same as the reference image but honestly I wasn’t able to replicate it accurately.
So that's when it struck me that sketching is not about replicating these beautiful sceneries and portraits but it's rather about admiring the beauty about it and making sure you understand exactly what and why you are drawing, along with making sure to keep the integrity of the masterpiece and at the same time adding your essence to it.
SERIOUSLY, What do I even mean by this? What am I even trying to prove, one might wonder?
Try to understand it by this,
At some point in life, we all have drawn a landscape with few houses a river, or maybe mountains in the background, and the sun setting or maybe rising.
Houses in the foreground with mountains in the back, while a river cutting through the mountain and making its way to the foreground of the drawing looks good, isn’t it?
Now just imagine if those mountains were not there so from where you would have created the source of the river? Can’t make it come from the sky right?
cus' we just know that a river descends from the mountains and not from the sky.
Try this, The strand of hairs starting from the forehead of a portrait and curling around the ears to land upon the neck of a portrait, defines the face type of the person in the portrait.
Got that now?
Hacking is also an art and just like in a sketch everything has a purpose, every protocol, every line of code does something and in order to break into it, you've to understand it to its root cause i.e how protocols work? what is their purpose right?
Everything works in an alignment and serves its purpose, those are just not random lines and structures. They are there for a reason, to complement one another and form something beautiful and sensible on canvas.
"Drawing helps people integrate relationship between parts."
For me; “Hacking or pen-testing for that matter is pretty much like sketching you’ve to understand why things are, the way they are?” after all that's what I think but in the end, you've to build your own think tank and use it fuel your own curiosity also it doesn't matter from where that motivation strikes from.
In order to master this, you have to have some prerequisites:
what are those,
You've to get good at problem-solving and
Reasoning
Not just solving a problem but also finding the most effective and efficient way to deal with it.
Learn to program also
Get familiar with Linux distros.
Learn basics of Networking.
Why there is so much emphasis on the ability to reasoning and problem-solving?
As a hacker or a programmer, it’s essential to understand things at their root causes and try to troubleshoot them before they escalate from our hands or cause heavy damage.
To be a hacker is lots of fun, but it's a kind of fun that takes lots of effort. The effort takes motivation. Just like how a businessman is motivated and takes pride in expanding their business and generating more wealth. Similarly, to be a good hacker you have to get accustomed to the ability to solve problems and sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence.
Learning to Program
Having programming skills play a major role while learning to hack because there are several arguments that you don't really need programming skills to master hacking and this argument is backed by the fact that "All the scripts are available on the internet, several payloads are pre-configured and availability of Linux distros such as kali Linux and parrot os makes it easy for hackers to skip hands-on programming, and jump on to cool stuff like exploitation phase." But what I think is in order to master your Kung-fu skills you have to work out regularly and built the stamina to ace at it. Right?
The same applies here to programing, If you don't know how applications are written or how sites run you may find yourself in trouble after spending some time in this field.
So you should learn how to program because:
"If you can build something from the scratch you'll definitely possess the power to break into it in a matter of seconds."
The big gun: Learning Networking
Networking haunts many beginners, if you honestly ask me it's quite a boring phase but a much-needed prerequisite in hacking.
Learning networking is quite tricky and if you are not a tech wiz it can be a little intimidating at the beginning.
The basics of networking like subnetting, routing, TCP/IP, the OSI Model, and Network protocols are really essential in the reconnaissance and scanning phase of pentesting because it gives us the essential information needed to learn about the target and really helps in picking the vulnerable sites or ports to target.
So without prior networking knowledge, you won't be able to read basic Nmap scans and that's a pretty big let-down cus without the proper reconnaissance, you can't really perform the exploitation.
Once you get hang of networking you really get going because you get to know how things work behind the scenes and that I believe that's enough to trigger that curiosity bubble in your mind.
Learning Linux:
Getting familiar with distro can be a crucial part, Linux is free, opensource and most importantly it encourages its users to get a hands-on approach to problem-solving.
As an educational tool, however, nothing is better than solving a real problem for yourself. That’s how most of us learned to program, and it’s how you can learn better system administration as well. Get your hands on one of the distros learn its file system and most importantly there are enough flavors of Linux available for everyone's taste so just find what suits you.
Why learn Linux?
You Can Brag to People on the Internet
And isn’t that really the point of it all?
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."
To conclude I would just like to say that those are just my views and ways of approaching things the point of this blog is how you can find your motivation from things you are good at.
Alright, amigos
Signing off!
Keep hacking!