learn to HACK (the best way) // ft. John Hammond

[Music] wow [Music] [Applause] [Applause] what's going on guys welcome back to network chuck let me know real quick if you can hear me i got a new setup going on and i don't know what's happening now today i've got a i got a hacker on the channel which i think is totally appropriate because things are getting hacked all over the freaking place i mean i woke up this morning and google scared the crap out of me um anyone else get like terrified about that and then also um solarwinds who doesn't use solarwinds no one right now um but now i hope you got got your coffee ready let's talk about the best way to learn hacking hacking is a discipline hacking takes time hacking is hard uh that's why i have mr john hammond on the channel john hammond probably doesn't need an introduction but you know what he's gonna come on and tell you anyway john you are on tell us about yourself man hey there what's up thanks so much now we're truck i'm happy to be here great great now real quick everybody in the chat let me know if everybody can hear john um and while you're letting me know john dude first of all who are you no better way no better way to start right so hey hi hello uh my name is john hammond i uh i'm a youtuber i guess i have a i have a cheesy youtube channel where i like to showcase uh cyber security content some ethical hacking right penetration testing programming tutorials capture the flag that's really i think my favorite aspect of it is showcasing capture the flag and how that's a great way to learn and practice and get better uh for my day job right to pay the bills i'm a security researcher over at huntress and we're doing a lot of uh really good stuff to keep the bad guys at bay the bad guys at bay well you know what you failed today yeah i guess so [Laughter] so okay so um you know let's get let's get right into the core content we'll definitely talk about the the solarwinds hack which is huge and you told me before the stream that you guys are kind of busy today with that uh and we'll get into the youtube thing i don't know if that was related or not i no one's really said anything yet but first let's get right into the meat of dude how can we start hacking what's the best way i know you you work with some great companies and in fact you've been doing some fun things recently with a certain company how what's the best way to do this man how can we start hacking yeah so i always uh recommend people explore and tinker and play because uh the whole the whole background right that you kind of have to have originally is just having a passion for this thing and and feeling that it's fun and something that you're really interested and engaged in uh and then when you have that kind of curious inquisitive mindset and that mentality you want to do more of this because it gets really hard and it kind of gets tough and you get a little discouraged but i think you can level that out and and and make it really good for you because there are activities and exercises and training that you can do and you have fun with it and you you love it along the way so i always shout from the rooftops that capture the flag or those ctf games and activities that's the best way to do it i always think that's the best way to get your hands on keyboard and do it for real do the real practical tangible the real hacking stuff that's not just talking about it you know the real hacking stuff okay and real quick there's an echo so i'll be working on this in the background um making sure nothing breaks but so real quick kind of kind of go on with that um when you say real hacking stuff what does that mean how can someone start doing that right now yeah it's funny you know all the time or often we kind of hear about some uh presentations and talks and and meetings that we all have talking about cyber security and there are a lot of buzzwords and stuff terms that we might just kind of throw around that have been a little oversaturated a little overused um and i don't need to like name and shame any of those but everyone has in their head you know the terms that they have probably heard a little too much of but i think getting on keyboard and doing it for real is where it's really at so when i say real hacking i mean being in the weeds programming scripting writing your own code whether or not that's in python whether or not that's in c sharp whatever language of choice and exploring different vulnerabilities exploring different bugs and software flaws and taking advantage maybe writing your own exploit and doing okay and so doing it for real um what's the best way to start that though because i you google hacking and how to start hacking it's daunting i know like learning python here learning linux they're doing this and that but where where do i start yeah there's it's really hard there's no good one-size-fits-all solution and answer for everyone because everyone's going to learn differently and everyone kind of absorbs and gathers information a different way i always really recommend people start with linux start with the command line start to kind of get your knowledge of the file system knowing how to like navigate move your way around between cd ls obviously the super simple commands that we're used to every day those are totally new for some people maybe someone doesn't know hey the difference between a mouse and a keyboard so i point people towards over the wire over the wire.org i think is a great resource bandits kind of their first getting started at war game and that's what they all are war games right to practice and to train over the wire does a great job showcasing some linux fundamentals and you can really use that as a jumping off point then get into python they get into pico ctf and other games and activities to learn so i i've definitely seen organ and wargames is free right oh definitely yeah so there are some platforms and we'll talk about a lot of these more in depth right between hack the box between try hackney between pen tester labs and plenty of the others some of them are free most of them are free some of them have like a subscription option so you might be able to go so far and say just about all of them are free but if you want to get more if you want to access more material more resources see a different kind of attack explore windows active directory or hardcore exploit development and binary exploitation and okay there's a little cost to that sometimes but a lot of the stuff is free the internet's wide open and you can go jump in and learn google around hmm okay so once we start with the war games and we kind of go through that we get the familiarity with linux and everything where do we go from there after i feel like you've got kind of linux under your belt i would recommend people pick up a scripting language or pick up a programming language uh python is my weapon of choice honestly i just tend to use that because it's a hacker's language right it's easy to read it's easy to write and there are tons of libraries modules functionality and documentation right a lot of people use this language so we talk about a lot we share the knowledge pick up a scripting language so you've kind of got a tool in your tool kit you know a weapon or a sword on your shoulder that you could use and then maybe those those steps one linux step two python or a scripting language then step three go play capture the flag uh i really really recommend ctftime.org online there at ctftime.org you can see all the upcoming events and competitions activities and games that you can play in all free and all online like all remote i know okay it's kind of tough to go to some uh irl spots right now so hey you can play online so recently i saw that you were doing some stuff with try hack me um tell me about them are they pretty fun i love try hackney and i don't know maybe maybe some people might pooh-pooh on that because you sir you know you survey everything that's out there i'm just a dude i'm just a guy kind of in the community and i like you know we like the stuff that's nice and good to work with so try hack me is great because it's very very beginner friendly so for folks that kind of aren't familiar with this and they want to get started i try hack me is a great resource try hack me will willingly give you the solutions it'll give you the write-ups even before you've solved the task so if you're banging your head against the wall if you were trying to get some attack some exploit abuse some vulnerability in some way and you just can't get it look there's no shame in just looking at the answers they're just taking a peek just kind of getting enough to see okay this is how i could move on in that task because you're trying to learn right sometimes if you're beating your head against the wall for weeks on end that sucks and that really really kind of drags you down that's all right they'll offer hints they'll hold your hand they'll give you a guided procedure to go through some learning i think try hack me is an incredible learning tool that's you know i i did one of the advent of cyber things they're doing right now which is really cool it's it's free for everyone to use and it's christmas themed and they take you through a bunch of like beginner-friendly hacking things and it was it was fun like it was really fun because yeah there were points i'm like i don't know how to do this this is weird i feel stupid like whatever but you can click on the hint and you're solid you're good like they'll show you how to do it and you do end up learning a ton through the process they even give you like kind of a write-up um about what you're learning like the first one was about cookies and http and like it was based basic stuff but so helpful for people just starting out i tried to uh i tried to help kind of kick off that advent of cyber event the whole exercise for this month so there's a there's a cheesy video of me and like a santa hat and a red bathrobe just getting started working through those cookies and uh my own task one that i had helped create and build and put together was released just yesterday december 13th so uh that was showcasing an old like linux kernel vulnerability uh taking advantage of dirty cow i don't know if you if you're familiar with kind of that technique but it's a kernel exploit so some old school kind of old deprecated technologies like ubuntu 1204 was uh what we ended up using and uh that's vulnerable to this dirty cow kernel exploit you could use so i wanted to showcase that highlight that and i don't know let people do it let people play and tinker with explore that code and compile it and do it awesome awesome um no i i do have this like burning question i always think about i'm not sure if you already mentioned this before but you said i mentioned you mentioned learning python how much python or programming to someone who needs to learn hacking like need to know like do we have to become full-fledged programmers or developers can we limp along with a bit of scripting knowledge where would you say is the best like the sweet spot in knowing a scripting or programming language so i'll go out i'll go i'll go right out and say that like i am not any any any excellent or incredible programmer or software engineer right i can't architect a whole application that could be used enterprise-wide all across an organization i i don't have the smarts for that truth be told right so you don't need to know an entire language inside and out the back of your hand you don't need to write an incredible application that supports however million users you don't need all those chops i do think you kind of need to understand programming logic right okay what's a variable what's a function what does this for loop do what does this while loop do how can i read and understand that and then putting those puzzle pieces together being able to kind of have that intuition or grow some critical thinking where you can solve a problem with the tools in your toolkit right computers and programming languages programming in general is just being able to do something really fast a lot of times so being able to automate attacks if you're doing sql injection right okay one example of vulnerability sure you could do that and maybe there's a quick and easy dump of the whole database with an or one equals one logic condition right okay but what if it's not giving you the whole database output it's not leaking everything all at once it'll give you maybe an error message or some some notification that hey something is i wasn't able to return all the results but now you have this kind of mental switch this duality between a true value and a false value that returns from the database and the server so you could write a script you could automate and program whether it be in python or whatever language of your choice you could try and determine one after the other what character will get that true message and you could be doing a a blind sql injection because you've written code that'll script and weaponize that is that i don't know how does that sort of answer your question yes yes it does and and one part yeah i i understand that learning the basics of programming will get you to a place where you can start maybe writing your own hacking tools automating some of the attacks but then i think about when we get to like maybe web app testing where you're you're looking at a web application and you're looking at some developers code trying to find a hole in there do you need to understand like some deep programming to be able to kind of parse through what they've written to be able to find bugs yeah now you're given a kind of a good spin on it because it helps having that software developer background and just kind of saying oh sure i'm working with a php web server or i'm working against a flask or a django like web application so if you have had a little bit more familiarity or your experience with how that language and that library will work and put together well that's super duper helps you're trying to find those flaws you're trying to find those gimmicks what function might be dangerous or unsafe to call that is a that is definitely a great skill that definitely helps you out if you have just a little bit of know-how or you've tinkered and played with that utility before you've tried to create something and then break it after the fact it gives you a cool retrospect i think okay gotcha now by the way um i had a chat come in from abed he says tell him that he is a legend thanks so much you're a legend too [Laughter] um so where was i going after that okay so i'm pretty familiar with i think most of my audience is with like getting started hacking um learning some scripting languages learning some linux getting to the point where you can go through some try hacking me boxes and and maybe even hack the box and going crazy how long do you think it takes to be able to put the badge on and say you know what i'm a hacker what do you what do you think is the time frame and obviously that varies based on how much time you have each day to get into it what your background is so i guess maybe for people who are watching who are just they're new to it and they think hacking sounds really freaking sweet what can they do and how long will it take i mean you you hit the nail on the head when you said hey it's a little subjective it's kind of tough because it depends on how much you're able to dedicate to it um and that's why i mention the passion right that's why i mentioned the drive and the determination to want to learn this and want to play with it so i've been doing i guess security you know big umbrella term right i've been doing this sort of thing for five years six years now um but that mean that's not to say okay it's going to take that long you might be a master of your craft in a year if you spend every single day practicing working on your skill set trying to get better studying for certifications going after courses etc etc i remember in the early days where i feel like i was getting started i feel like when i when i wanted to learn and just be a sponge and absorb everything i remember staying up late uh and i remember like looking at my phone right to set an alarm for the next day like hey i gotta get up at six or whatever and i've gotta get up at seven and i remember the alarm notification tells you like your alarm will go off in three hours oh good it's it's three in the morning or whatever because i've i've been trying to improve myself i've been trying to study i've been trying to practice and prepare so i think that's that dedication helps that's really the best way to do it maybe it'll take six months to pick something up pick up something new maybe it'll take a year maybe it'll take two or more but don't let that discourage you just tinker just tinker i like that i like that and yeah of course it does of course vary based on your background um now what you do like i've talked with stoke and i've talked with uh not homsek and they're they're more bug bounty are you are you into bug bounty or do you kind of do a different kind of hacking yeah i really wish i was more into bug bounty um it's you know life takes over right obligations and commitments and things and responsibilities and i i have failed to make the time to get into bug bounty i don't know if you can hear my dog barking in the background or whining because like hey we got stuff we got to take care of at home i don't do as much bug bounty as i'd like to but i've had really cool conversations with nomsec with ben uh just trying to talk about the differences in like the mental state of capture the flag and bug bounty like what's your approach what's your method what's your methodology how are you gonna and real quick just just for those of us or those of you who are here who don't really know the difference like when you compare what you do what i guess is more are you blue team or red team capture flag i think you lean a little bit more red team and for kind of what i have done in the past as a red team operator is offensive adversarial you put on your hacker hat you're acting as the adversary you're being the bad guy so essentially work good so sorry so essentially i mean red teaming if you're doing bug bounty or you're you're doing kind of capture the flag kind of pin testing scenarios those are both red teaming scenarios what's the main difference between those two guys so bug bounty in my mind you're working against a real life actual application you're you're trying to find the bugs and the software flaws and the vulnerabilities in a real company and their real application that they put out for real in the real world uh that is the reason why if you find potential software flaws you can get paid and that's hey that's the awesome thing with stoke and nomsec and hacker one integrity and bug crowd and all these different bug bounty like vdps or vulnerability disclosure programs stuff like that because it's for real and there's a little asterisk and a disclaimer with that one because that's a pretty wide pool to play in right that's the whole internet you might be beating up and there might not be a vulnerability there you might be banging your head against the wall and it's completely fruitless there's there's nothing that you could hack into that's a good point i mean these these big companies like apple and tesla are saying hey come hack us because they're probably thinking we're pretty good like we're good but just in case just in case come at us [Laughter] that's a formidable foe so that does suck though because i mean you're you're literally beating your head against the wall for i don't know how long it takes a normal bounty to take and then you could end up finding nothing that would be super frustrating demoralizing yeah i totally get that yeah so the other side of that coin right when we talk about capture the flag that's a game that's a sport uh sometimes people kind of trivialize that or they say oh it's not real world it's not real hacking i would counter that and say no it absolutely is uh you you're going to be getting exposed to different technologies different software different vulnerabilities and exploits that you do really see in the real world or you might you might stumble upon a zero day doing your research and do crazy stuff that's happened that's for real the hard part with that is that bug bounty and that real life application there's going to be some tough security because it's like an actual corporation business entity yeah yeah it wasn't like tailor-made to find the vulnerability they're thinking i don't have anything wrong with me but just prove me wrong yeah bug bounty and capture the flag differ in that we're in the ctf you know that there's a vulnerability you know that there's something that you can exploit and take advantage of and abuse so that helps you kind of zoom in and kind of narrow what you're looking at and what you're researching and learning about uh but then you might not get paid as much who knows so describe what you do so i mean you i guess you are capture the flag type of a guy but like professionally you work for huntress labs correct i do yes and wha what is it you do like i know you can't mention in the beginning but like let's dig a little deeper and like okay i'm a noob tell me what you do sure uh and i don't mean for this to ever accidentally be some sort of product pitch i don't i don't mean to be speaking on the on behalf of huntress or anything this is just me john uh telling you a little bit about what i do so um i work in the in the thread ops department which means that i'm going to be looking at the tech and the programs and files and all the code that we end up seeing in scrolling by in a day to day so huntress specifically focuses on persistence and that back door that a hacker might leave so they can maintain their access and i love this i think this is a super simple idea but crazy smart because if a hacker does break in if the hacker does compromise your network what's the first thing they're going to do they're going to leave their persistence they're going to make sure they can get back in really easily right right so that's what we hunt for and we might be looking at malware or ransomware or command and control servers or crypto miners or beacons that do post exploitation to steal data and we're trying to understand okay how's that going to look is that living off the land techniques where you use the programs that are native to your computer by default okay your windows computer oh it's got powershell oh it'll run maybe some microsoft office or microsoft word macros you really see those that's how you can land that fishing attack that's how you can get that that spear fish and your whaling technique to get initial access on a victim or a target okay okay so you're basically doing advanced techniques to try and find the the footholds that hacker will get when they do find an exploit or vulnerability yeah absolutely and that can be a uh quite a deep rabbit hole because uh that means that we are going to we want to look at those real world stuff right they're going to have to the hackers right the bad guys and the threat actors they have to deliver a payload and they have to get their exploit in and slide under the radar because you've got to deal with anti-virus you know your windows defender your i don't know what whatever you want norton mcafee i'm just listing things off the top of my head and you've got to be able to get it to execute and not be detected it's got to be stealthy it's got to be a good hack so it's going to be obfuscated it's going to be kind of mangled and it looks like gibberish how can you always detect that with a signature or with some heuristics you know that our antivirus solutions or our firewalls always talk about uh i think it's paramount to have a human understand like i don't know you network chuck might look at some big long string of text and you see a couple equal signs at the end there you're like oh that's base64. oh they're trying to hide some data from me they're encoding it in a different way that hey you've got that context you've got that understanding and that intuition hey why is my like word pad why is my word office document processor spawning a command prompt that doesn't make sense no no if it does that guys run just throw your computer away it's gone [Laughter] so um did i lose you i wasn't sure if i lost you there nope no no okay yeah yeah yeah uh so i had a question from let's see it was from travis let me pull it up here so i can actually read it i lost it in the queue here but it's on the screen right now you might be able to see it it says uh what certification would you recommend as an embedded safety critical software engineers get into the industry oh here it is uh well let me start over what certification would you recommend an embedded safety critical software engineers get to get in the industry able to hold on to kind of word of weird travis i'll work on it though system safely safely talking to services in the cloud so i guess how can you are there any certifications around embedded systems so i guess iot maybe talking to the cloud it's kind of a hard question to answer i'll be honest yeah um i can start to talk a little bit about some neat nerdy certifications though uh talking about the cloud specifically right we got a couple players in the game we got digitalocean for one thing we've got microsoft azure azure however you want to say it azure aws yeah your heart your hardcore azure well i i it was my first love i'm not tied to anyone but it was my first love excellent obviously there is the google cloud platform gcp and each of those i think have their own stack of certifications right so you're you're pretty familiar with the microsoft azure one they've got a solid hey microsoft like library of that right oh yeah yeah you got the az104 which is their associate level certification solid cool so um i got a question from ours and oh they're actually they're just saying hi they said uh i freaking love you guys met you four months ago i guess talking to you i started with practice with thc uh try hack me uh i think right security pin testing and networking and i really love ctf cheers from argentina you you are the real heroes for me for real that's cool thanks so much that's super fulfilling yeah it is it means a lot to hear that kind of stuff um now do you have any hacking certifications i'm curious i do oh my goodness which ones do you not have that's a better question right i'm gonna sound like such a jerk you know such a d-bag of like oh i have os blah blah blah and just list off all these letters to my name well this is actually interesting because you know the last two guys i had on the channel stoke and nomsa they don't do certifications they're bug bound they're like they don't do that game but you're different you do ctfs you do pin testing you focus on the enterprise and so you do certifications because that makes sense for you what do you what do you have and i guess after you list the after we are here for three hours and you list all your certifications uh tell us what your favorite one is and which ones you think we should get for sure so if it's cool i'll give you a little bit of my my background and why i wanted to go through some of those so like i originally kind of got my feet wet in cyber security and hacking and all this this stuff um with the with the us coast guard and you know the military kind of pours that flare of okay what's good versus evil what's good versus bad here we care more about the security of stuff rather than uh making all these new things and that was how i kind of got into it because i originally like every kid you know wants i want to make video games when i get older i think 90 of us all wanted to do that and like only like one percent of us ended up doing it yeah i'm waiting i'm waiting on your your next mobile game network chuck oh no no no because then y'all will just hack it and it'll it'll be pointless so uh i wanted to learn all that stuff so i got into programming first and then that introduced me to the cyber security scene and hacking and capture the flag pen testing bug money all of it the floodgates open up and being in that sphere then i kind of pivoted to the department of defense and was looking at more like government contracting jobs so they have uh a little bit more of an eye because of their standards right and all the policies and stuff that they have to meet they gotta make sure their employers have certifications so i uh wanted to pick up just to bolster my resume right to get the foot in the door to skirt past hr i went for security plus security plus was my first certification because you needed to have it it was like dod 8570 level 2 or something and then i went for oscp because everyone has to have that i guess i don't know that's got a lot of you know industry recognition that has a lot of public knowledge to it it does it does like so like real quick i want to pause there for a second that's something i'm pursuing right now is the oscp so you went from security plus to oscp that seems to me like an ocean between those two certifications how did you even like begin to look at that yeah and i'll be honest here right so security plus uh was kind of something that i needed to go for and i had to have for the for the job right so that's something that it's just a check box i'll be honest and in my mind that was very high level and conversational and ideas and mental processes and things right so theory and no practical at that point right yeah you can dump on it it's okay it's fine so all this time i had been studying and practicing and playing with capture the flag which is again in my mind that real world actual hands-on keyboard technical stuff so the oscp is like the crown jewel right i wanted to go i want to go after that and everything that i had learned through playing capture the flag through looking through try hack me hack the box over the wire smash the stack etc i could go i could list resources and war games forever but all that stuff super duper prepared me for the offensive security certified professional so it's just like a rite of passage you know you got to get that and then what's next uh i wanted to keep kind of running through that offensive security gauntlet so osce osw e oswp uh i started to look into the elearn security stuff ecppt ejpt the python certification one i just kind of want to have my name hey i know python right believe me when i say it it's fun i think those are really cool because they are hands-on because they're application-based learning so that just felt like a challenge and a something like a to tinker with something to play with so okay so you just listed like the alphabet and that was a lot of stuff now everyone knows the oscp i i've definitely seen the other acronyms they throw out the osce is that like a more advanced version of the oscp is that yeah yeah so osce originally was meant to be offensive security certified expert um and that got into some binary exploitation and like memory corruption stuff and windows buffer overflows and egg hunters instruction exception handlers etc originally and that was an old course so i'm sure you're familiar and everyone i think a lot of your audience is familiar with kali linux but before that there was backtrack linux oh yeah and that was the old old course that osce would ship with backtrack as their virtual machine so it was it was in need of an update it kind of needed a little revamp so now offset has changed that to osce3 like cube and they're rolling out new courses to be able to take the place of that and they actually retired that original like old school binary exploitation course that's that's that's probably the best i would assume now i'm curious like with the course like oscp i mean i get like try hack me and hack the box how they can stay up to date with all the new trends a new hack comes out a new thing you have to know they make a new box that matches that skill set how can like oscp and all these other certifications keep up because like it's there's so many new things happening all the time and by the way we got a new member of the channel daruno welcome to the 10x engineer anyways by the way guys just so you know before you answer this next question uh we will do some q a at the end of our discussion here so bring in the questions and we'll we'll knock them out here in a bit anyways continue oh no where did we leave off goodness oh yeah i kind of took us down a uh a path oh okay how can the like do you think the oscp and all these hacking certifications keep keep up with the current demands of what a hacker needs the skill sets yes so it's funny because we hold oscp up on that pedestal um because it's a writer passage everyone's got to get it it's it's a way to get kind of that notch on your belt as a pen tester um but after the fact once you've got that done you've washed your hands of oscp you're feeling accomplished then all of a sudden everyone tells you that's an entry-level certification and you're like what i studied so hard i know like this is the hardest thing everyone talks about it and then no that's for babies so was it as hard as people say yes uh and i'll say that with the caveat because like i felt good going through it because i felt like hey i practiced and i got prepared and i learned enough for it um but for someone that's kind of new to the scene getting into it it might throw you for a loop again it's not extremely off the wall incredibly hard but it'll challenge you that's the whole point okay gotcha and it's and it's a wide range of skills right i mean you're it covers so many different tools and and from from what i understand you can come at it from different ways you can use whatever tool you want to attack these scenarios there is a limit i think on your use of metasploit right because metasploit is that huge open source framework incredible tool to be able to pull an exploit right off the shelf and just load it in like you're like you're like loading a gun and hey it's point-and-click hacking it's point-and-shoot hacking so you can only use it once for the oscp so okay i do want to hit this subject before we move on and i asked stoke and i asked nah i'm sec but what's your definition of it because you mentioned metasploit what's your definition of a script kitty ooh cause we all we all don't want to be one that's a bad right bad how do we avoid it that's a dangerous question here it's a loaded um i think what what will differentiate you from being a script kitty is kind of that second step that i talked about right is that once you've picked up your programming language you've picked up the scripting language that you love and you want to work with you will start to write your own tools and you will start to automate and that that doesn't have to be again your always own creation because you're going to pour around you can explore on github and you'll see other people's code and you're like this is awesome they did an incredible job with this but if you were able to look through it and read it and tweak it just slightly kind of change it for your own purpose as as you need okay you're not a script kitty because you're just you're adapting what you need for your environment if you just sort of change the port you change the ip address and maybe you're a script it's really hard to contain i don't know and i i agree with that in part um yeah i and of course you know this is me expert network chuck nom i'm a noob and hacking but i've heard a lot of people say like as long as you understand the technologies you're using as you're issuing or using these tools you understand networking you understand the exploits you're not just going click oh the it's on fire cool i did it now you have to understand why it caught off fire why it's down um but yeah that's that's interesting so now uh with the hacking search you got the oscp you got all the elearns which would you say is now did you get all the elearns like did you get all of them no no okay plenty more to do so actually that's going to bleed into my next question after this one uh which one was the hardest one for you oh um i'll be honest the osw e and that pulls us in kind of a different direction from our conversations right that was um offensive securities web exploitation and the bug bounty stuff is what gets you it's interesting because i like i consider web to be like my favorite like that's the first category i'll go for it in a jeopardy style capture the flag game but they're going to throw some again enterprise-wide applications that you might not see in a in a for fun tiny capture of the flag game so you'll have some dot-net giant code base like aspx website that you'll have to pour through and oswe changes your mentality because with oscp and all the other offensive security certifications you're doing like a a black box test a black box test where you don't know what is on that server and you're trying to from externally trying to break into it and take it apart oswe they're going to give you all the source code they're going to give you that entire application and you get to see on that on that server how it works and it's like finding a needle in a haystack when you're looking through a gig or two gigabytes of someone else's source code oh my goodness that's tough that sounds terrible and i would imagine you would use tools to parse through all those things and you'd have to know how to use those tools to find everything but still it sounds like a tedious job offensive security tells you like hey you're not allowed to use any automated tools really for finding that vulnerability yeah you just you kind of got to look through the code paths and explore where can your input go like what can you control as the end user as the hacker and how does that data follow through in the code procedure and then you'll look for those unsafe functions you'll look for those fault those flaws and vulnerabilities still needle in a haystack dude yeah i'm not gonna do that one although i i can't say that yet because i might i might like it i don't know that just from the onset sounds terrible um so so that was your most difficult one now you mentioned someone asked about it earlier and i wanted to ask about as well you mentioned a python certification was that part of the hacking certification portfolio that you you went through that is i think known as pcapp yeah the python python certified associate in python programming um that's something that the python institute puts out and i'm like googling off on my other monitor right now well that's and that's confusing because you know pcapp is a wireshark capture and why do they do that exactly exactly the first thing you search you know pcapp is like wireshark oh crap okay how do i search this yep okay so i think they're waiting on like the next renditions of that because they consider the certified associate to be like the beginner getting started fundamentals one and they they're wanting to roll out others but i don't know if they're out yet interesting so right i love like i truly people my channel knows i love certifications i love the ability to have a curriculum a standard a path to go down and then take the test and say yeah yeah dude i know it i've been i've been validated uh what do you think about python certifications do they actually validate that skill set tough questions i'm like firing no it's good it's good it's good um my answer to that is no uh and maybe that'll make a couple people uneasy i don't know um so we we've had the conversations right between a theoretical multiple choice test where maybe you just need rote memorization and it's a data dump you forget it the next day then we have the hands-on practical application-based exams where you've really got to get in the weeds and and do it for real i think that helps i prefer the latter but when you're trying to do a programming certification it's weird sometimes pcapp i think specifically would give you here's what the code looks like read it and tell me what's wrong or what this does or what the result of this operation might be and that's like a strange and uncomfortable amalgamation of those two right but you're not writing it yourself you're not building it you're not doing it so maybe it's a little lackluster in my mind but that's i'm just that's my opinion right i'm just one guy just one dude i i can't say if that's gospel or not so it sounds like at best they're teaching you how to like be a good quality control guy like being able to look through code and and and see what's happening but not be able to write it yourself um now would you say that a certification like pcapp would be enough to say okay i know enough python to go through some hacking things or demonstrate i can do python scripting and hacking yeah so i would say yes to that one um i wanted to have pcapp at the very least on my resume so when i told someone yeah i know python that they actually believe me like and it helps obviously having a resume it helps obviously like having your portfolio your github that you can share and you can showcase but um something about these three or four letters i don't know hr likes their certifications so they they do they really do and that's why certifications are there like it's it's for hr to weed through people it's it's for hiring managers to be able to find people like us um so you got a million certifications you got the oscp after security plus of course you had a lot of a lot of work in between that uh going through ctfs and all these different things um so remind me again how long have you been doing this side of security you said six years yeah i think five five years now five to six and and before then what were you doing uh so then it was play and learn and experiment in software development or just creating uh and that's kind of where i had picked up as much of python as i as i guess i do people make fun of me you know my my channel my audience likes to likes to poke fun at me like hey wherever john goes as long as you have a as long as he has a python interpreter he'll be okay because i'll just default to using that well that's good i i like python for that reason it is kind of the de facto language for every area of it right now um i talk a lot about network engineering and and cloud stuff and dude python is right there every every test every documents like yeah you can learn anything you want but we're going to talk about python well then we should probably learn python um for sure now elearn security i i look at their certifications and they have a million acronyms like every other person does and they're not as well known at least from my perspective uh when i look up things so do you recommend starting with like the ejpt is that the first one you should start with yeah ejpt is the um junior penetration tester and that's not meant to water down or distill uh anything that you're learning um but it's meant to create the foundation it's it's lay it's meant to lay out the framework so that you can learn and you understand all those networking concepts so you really you aren't a script kitty back to that conversation that we have and it gets actually pretty in-depth or it touches on i think different concepts and techniques that you don't see in other certifications um especially pivoting and like being able to laterally move around a network that you might have compromised during your hack and that's that adds a real world element to it right but you don't i don't think you see that all the time in other certification exams so elearn security i think really bolsters uh what we're going to be seeing in in an actual realistic network environment and that's what i've heard about elearn um so that brings me to my next question and i'm constantly getting this question all the time the entry-level hacking certifications we have some big names in in the fight here we've got and this is assuming after security plus which i know isn't like hands-on but it does give you that good base and it does satisfy the dod compliance but now we have ceh from the ec council we've got pen test plus from comptia then we have the elearn certifications do you have you first of all have you taken pin test plus i assume you have just because you've taken everything to be honest i have not done i've found one he hasn't done it i found one yeah you guys got me um but i would assume being in the industry you may have heard a few things about it so without having taken it what would you say is the best place for someone to start and would you even say ceh at all oh i don't want to be i don't want to be that guy no it's okay you're you're on here to give people direction and if you have a great opinion because you're in the industry like it's very rare to get someone like yourself on on this answer so let's let's leave people in the right direction i don't hold a lot of water to ceh um because it it feels like that kind of rote memorization data dump and i've taken ceh and i got that out of the way for a dod you know standard but it wasn't fun and i didn't like it and i would not admittedly advocate for that and again that's not to poo poo on ec council just my thoughts and opinion as a guy as a member of the community um you might have to school me on pentest plus you might have to kind of fill me in as to all the goodies that that comptia and the ringer that they'll throw you for pentest plus yeah i'll be honest i haven't taken it yet but i've heard good things about it um and the fact that i think it gives you the same compliance that ceh does um i i they recently got that dod compliance it was 8570. um so that's it checks that box at like i don't know a sixteenth the price i mean goodness gracious ceh is so expensive that's what the biggest oh my gosh oh i remember that like this hurt my wallet just yeah like and also you have to i mean they say it's entry level but then you have to demonstrate you have like two years of experience or i forget what it is but you have to have experience you have to prove it like come on dude well i'm paying you for this let me try it doesn't matter i have not taken the ceh like practical um so i take take my opinion with a grain of salt because i as i've said i much prefer the practical hands-on tangible application and i don't know how that looks in ceh practical i had just taken it when it was the multiple choice yeah and it's also it's a separate test i mean most people are going to go down the ceh the main one after what they call it's just ceh but yeah they have the practical but who actually does practical i mean i think the practical for most people would be move on and go to oscp that's kind of what i imagine right let's goodness um so in your mind and the industry you're in now if you were to look and try to hire somebody for your team what certification do you want to see on their resume if it had to be one this is a tough question it'll bring us into new territory so good good we talked a lot about oscp and we talked a lot about all these other different certifications um and we talked a little bit about how huntress or the stuff that i would do for my team is now getting into actual real malware samples and ransomware and post exploitation command and control all the crazy stuff all the real world stuff and now when i mentioned oscp is that entry-level certification oh okay that's like a stab through the heart but offsec and offensive security has just released os ep and that's a new one that's a whole other acronym thrown into the mix of our alphabet soup i need to test just for the acronyms and then i can once i pass that then i can take one of the exams that is gracious so os ep i think they call it like what experienced penetration tester but it dives into creating a phishing microsoft office macro it dives into doing some http smuggling like a drive-by download to force a file on your computer if you just visited the attacker's website it gets into anti-virus evasion between like loading shell code into memory through powershell or through c-sharp or through visual basic script or jscript all these other options that you have native to windows and it it's super cool they just released it i i'm cruising through it or trying to and i'm a big fan i i honestly really like it and that certainly is in line with what i'm seeing day to day really okay so if you saw the osep the os ep on someone's right you're like okay top of the resume pile for me at the moment i was going through the course last week and i remember seeing some powershell commandlet that would like compile c sharp on the fly to be able to use in code and i remember seeing some files that it created like artifacts that left on disk for that technique and i was like oh i saw that at work like just the other day and i'm like oh this finally [Laughter] that's that's amazing and i imagine that might be kind of a rare moment to have like real world intersex so closely with study and certification study that's pretty cool um that's that's what we all want though like at the end of the day right is have it to be tangent and applicable to our jobs our lives so i i loved that was such a cool novel moment for me so so your job that makes sense because like you're getting more into i would you say it's reverse engineering malware a bit just kind of looking under the hood yeah um you're not gonna be breaking open ida pro or ghidra or hopper or binary ninja unless you like really want to and you we totally could right um at the end of the day when you when you talk about security and you talk about it with customers or you talk about it with people that it's it's affecting their business and their daily operations you get to a point where they don't care about the nerdy stuff like they don't care oh what kind of shell code it's loading into memory or how it does it with whatever obfuscation they just want to know whether it's good or bad [Laughter] sometimes you can tell right off the nose and it's like all right we don't need to do our analysis because i clearly see your call to this crypto miner or whatever gotcha that makes sense that makes total sense so now from your perspective you would love to see the os ep now industry-wide what do you think certification holds the most value just if i'm a new guy trying to get my foot in the door what are people looking for in my mind and i'm i'm going on the on a limb in a weird way i'm kind of operating at the edge of my understanding because elearn security and they offer one course in certification called eptx and it's penetration testing extreme [Laughter] everyone goes for the x and that's hilarious i love it you know yeah i got a little bit but that ecptx showcases um more in the weeds windows exploitation active directory penetration testing and abusing microsoft exchange et cetera et cetera and when you look at a penetration testing job for a real organization or enterprise you've got like what 99 95 90 of all endpoint devices or workstations or servers are windows yep yeah some are linux right we can't forget there are plenty of servers that are linux but doing a real world penetration test you're going to be targeting the user targeting the client the poor human phishing attack victim and then you'll break into the domain you're getting the domain controller and you do all this i think that ecptx really really gets into that now the caveat the asterisk here i haven't finished ec ptx so i again don't take that one with a grain of salt you got to get on this i'm really disappointed in you um i'm waiting on you once you get it then i know i can right if you wait for me you're gonna be waiting for a while dude um now a lighter note i've got a comment here that says um i don't know if you've ever gotten this you're a mix between seth rogen and ed sheeran if you're a hacker i see it all the time every single youtube video that's funny i love twitter it's either ed sheeran uh or seth rogen or the jurassic park like the john hammond jokes yes yes actually before the live stream i was like telling my wife i'm like making my coffee is that the same guy from jurassic park am i gonna bring that up yeah i should so i'm glad you brought it up for me [Laughter] i choose to fill i don't know how i'm ever going to overtake that name on the on the internet that's pretty difficult like i i don't you know what i think you you'll have to hack your way into it just apparently they're hackable so you know we'll get to that here in a minute by the way how much time do you have i don't want to keep you too long i have the evening for you my friend oh man eight hour stream here we come guys i have to make some more coffee in a minute so i i don't know if i'm okay to say but like network chuck and i this is the first time we've met so if we're brown out like that's that's for real nothing is staged here and i told him that before i'm like don't tell me anything about yourself leave me this a mystery because i want to actually get to know you on the stream we can all get to know you together that's more authentic it's more fun um so i'm gonna keep drilling you on some certification stuff um so you mentioned east i can't remember the freaking acronyms dude i get lost so much so ec ptx and now they're on version two so that's that sounds cool um and obviously windows hacking's pretty pretty important again because you mentioned like every organization it's every organization i've worked for windows desktop sometimes you might have a mac here and there but mainly windows and then the core the active directory all the servers are going to be running windows most of them are that's just how it is now beyond that what kind of what kind of job do these certifications get you like right now you're working for a company that mainly deals with with hacking that's what your company does do individual companies like large infrastructures hire red teamers do they hire pen testers just to have on staff yes and no so no and it's it's a bummer answer especially when we kind of talk more and more about security um because look 2020 this year was like a freaking earthquake don't don't say earthquake you're giving it ideas uh and it was a wake-up call you know it was just one after the other in the in meat space in the real world and in the digital world um today being no exception and it's we're not we still aren't even at the end yet but we're seeing hey remote work so your companies gotta make sure they all the workers all their employees can access the company infrastructure from home uh okay let's open rdp let's open remote desktop protocol to the public internet that's a bad idea we don't we don't want to touch that stove again so people never learn they need a couple times yeah so i i i'm sorry i've been goofing off and i forgot your original question here i forgot to all right uh no i'll find my way back um no i won't it's gone now let's move right along then uh no no no no yeah what do companies hire pen testers to have on staff so i am of the opinion that every single company should have their own like vulnerability disclosure program their vdp their own bug bounty um and that doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be like okay a bug crowd or hacker one or anything along that i think if you have your own internal red team that is constantly testing the product that you're making the websites your your public like open facing you know presence on the internet in the world that's where your security is going to be coming in from from yourself like the onus is on you every every company has to do that because when you go for a penetration test it is a one-time snapshot very temporary very ephemeral it's a moment in time where you've looked at your security posture uh things might change yeah you know they do i i think having someone that is dedicated to doing that testing as part of your team makes you all the better interesting interesting um so i the way i always understood pen testing and uh before i got into this world was that it was just it was just a company that people hired and we need to pen test have them come in let's we'll meet our compliance that's the majority of the reasons i've ever hired somebody just i want to be compliant that's it yep that's exactly right in q4 right now everyone's scrambling hey hey we got to get this so we can check the box for compliance gotcha gotcha gotcha now do you think uh this kind of loaded question as well so get ready keep hitting him yeah man so we we have the new devops culture right we have code being applied and patches being applied so quickly it's insane which obviously opens up the opportunity for more hacks more vulnerabilities hackers get i mean programmers get a bit lazier or not lazier just they miss things that's just human nature uh do you think that's opening up more jobs for cyber security that's the first question and to kind of piggyback on top of that there is also more automation there are tools that can automatically detect things and scan things for us do you think that maybe is causing cyber security jobs not to be so maybe they'll go away i don't know what do you think because you do this all the time yeah so there was a lot to digest there um it was funny it wasn't a loaded question it was just a big there were there were some parts to it i was just yeah fire like i was just everything at you go so number one you were asking about devops and cloud-based stuff and so infrastructure at scale right yeah exactly so cicd kubernetes docker all the buzzwords do you think that's leaving up leaving open holes in our our stuff and for lack of a better term and i can't think right now do you think it's leaving us open and more cyber security jobs are going to be open as well so let me go in a couple different places and different directions with those first of all i stink in love docker and i'm falling in love with kubernetes um weeper hosting we've been trying to put together some capture the flag and training activities ourselves like some that that i and my team do um and we've moved into the google cloud platform to be able to take advantage of kubernetes to cluster the the front-end application and all the challenges in the phone okay and it's awesome it's awesome if anyone is willing to uh help us test this new stable infrastructure we're hosting a game this wednesday and i can i can fill in a little bit more of that if we're cool but the next part that i want to go with that is that when you had asked does this mean we have more gaps and holes that we aren't aware of in cyber security yeah because vulnerabilities happen because we're i mean hackers literally scan for code changes and see if there's any mistakes and we're constantly applying changes now and that the more changes you have the more opportunities you have for failure yeah and it's an interesting problem when we put a lot of that reliance into that pipeline that ci cd pipeline uh because sure you've got something now that is is good and awesome in in theory right because you could mass send out and deploy and produce and bring up to production uh code that you've just developed potentially badness with that if there's a accident or mistake or flaw in what you push and and what you actually send to the pipeline or the pipeline itself who knows i i don't think i'd be able to pinpoint one exact specific flaw or thing for you right now but there is still a risk as there always is with everything yeah yeah i totally agree now the other question and i'll just refresh you on that because i asked you a lot of things uh do you think automation tools which are you know becoming more prevalent do you think automation tools will eventually automate security to where it'll automatically scan for things automatically even ai automatically scanning for things that normally a hacker would scan for using a butt load of tools do you think that'll kind of make some jobs go away cool yeah i remember you had asked will this whole devops thing make more jobs in cyber security and you've got the question will it take away some jobs right yes sweet sweet first one i think it will make jobs because when people are trying to get smart with terraform and vagrant and ansible and chef and puppet and docker and kubernetes and all of these things you kind of have to be pretty in the know on that you got to you got to learn up and study all those things that's going to make some jobs in my opinion and your question is is these mass scanners this automation is that going to take away jobs um and i say this like thinking about tools like git lab if you're familiar with that and it'll automatically kind of scan your code as you're writing it as you submit it in your pipeline and and look for the most popular cbes and see if anything has been found in your code just automatic bypassing security teams this uh i think gets into some interesting thought that i try to scream and shout from the rooftops is that we can't always trust our automated solutions um and i tied that back to kind of the conversation of antivirus and firewall that we were talking about like there's a heuristic there's a signature there's some behavioral analysis and that should trigger this detection it should flag for malicious badness and evil um good awesome great but what if it doesn't uh and that's okay easy and sometimes hard to press the i believe button on that but when we talk about things like our sock or our security operation center and we've got our flashy dashboard and our single pane of glass and the log aggregation that we're going to get all of our alerts from all the events in the organization and enterprise security at scale we talk a lot about how we get false positives it's like oh god false positives noise things that we don't care about useless information that's triggering and it's just not a real incident right i realize that's part of the conversation that's in the spotlight but i think we need to talk about the false negatives when there's some evil and badness and there's a hacker here there's insecurity but you don't know because it didn't tell you uh that was scary [Laughter] well i that was a difficult question to answer and yeah i think he did great um i don't think that really wasn't good i should have appreciated that i don't know what answer i was looking for um i just wanted to ask it because it popped in my brain and uh thank you well i hope that's what uh i hope everyone else thinks that that's a cool thought exercise well yeah it's i mean i'm sure if people are in security especially blue team and and uh defensive like that comes into your thought process all the time and we have all these systems that are always analyzing and looking for heuristics and signatures but man a hacker can just change the way he attacks and then subverts and hides it's just crazy what you can do anyways um so i really i want to change gears for a second because uh i think about ctfs and what you do um you're involved in creating ctfs you're involved in the ctf community it's like gaming and it sounds really cool that way um there are some new tools out i've heard about like hack the box has their battlegrounds where it's very have you heard about that yes absolutely and it seems very very gamerific like i could see people on twitch streaming these things and going at it what do you think about all this stuff okay what do you think about hacking becoming more gamified this is perfect uh yesterday i was co-hosting and uh helping present what was called the ultimate hacking competition which was a live stream on twitch uh that was a live capture of the flag competition in a game where there were 10 players and they were racing to solve like three challenges to break into a machine escalate their privileges and and compromise and win and i'm like shout casting like uh espn like esports style thing like oh oh the docker breakout he's almost got the syntax that is excellent yeah it was a ton of fun it was a blast do you watch sports because i don't watch sports but i would watch that i do not you know i i'm not into the support ball but that that's i can get behind that i would love to uh i'd love to scream and showcase that a little bit more because it was put on by dual core one of the djs and music producers kind of in our scene which is which is an absolute blast and it was an honor to be a part of it but it was so stinking cool and hack the box battlegrounds and try hack making the hill i don't know if we ever will get to a point where it is cyber security esports hacking as a spectator sport but gosh darn it we should well i mean the way i think about it like yeah someone coming in and they'd have to understand quite a bit about hacking to appreciate what's happening in those in those things but i don't know i'll get on a stream on twitch and i see someone playing league of legends which i don't play and i'm like i have no idea what's happening here why is everyone watching this this seems really complex and stupid uh but i i think that could be a thing like as more people get into hacking man it would be really fun to watch that especially as you're learning like wow look at these guys doing this oh look at this it's it's really cool i'm hoping i'm really hoping it becomes like that because um video games are a waste of time unless you're like making millions of dollars doing it most of us it's a waste of time making hacking a sport that's always a good use of your time you're learning and that would be really cool like to to make that something that people aspire to do and skill up in that'd be amazing and and think of the the how secure things will become if more people get into it like that i mean mr robot's already done that for us right now i i a thousand percent agree that would be that would be crazy cool it's it's a learning vessel even if you're not actively doing it just kind of watching it uh i was worried like before we were gonna do this show and i was gonna co-host with him dual core and everyone because i was like oh what if it's a vulnerability that i don't know about what if it's an exploit that i'm just not smart enough for and he said like no you know sometimes we it's pretty informal we learn even as we're watching the players like we'll see them use a new tool we'll see a different technique to get around some web application firewall and that was just so stinking cool that sounds incredibly fun i'm hoping that really catches on um now let's just change gears a bit we've talked a lot about ctfs and hacking and all that kind of stuff let's talk about the recent hack um you said you were kind of busy today with solar winds and everything i woke up to this i was i talked about on my stream on twitch this morning i wake up and i look at solar winds i'm like okay that's interesting i should make a youtube video about that so i thought about making a youtube video that morning i go to check youtube i can't freaking log in that scared me to death because like that's my livelihood like this is what i do right here i couldn't log into it i go to try and log into my gmail account type in my email address that manages all my stuff it says account doesn't exist i don't exist now like i'm done i'm gone that terrified me so tell me what you know i haven't researched it a lot today i've been super busy so tell me what you know about the solarwinds hack yeah i'll be honest i don't know how much light i could share on google the the google outage today uh because i was kind of spread thin uh going crazy with everyone else on fire about the solar winds that's good enough i think and i was frantically running around back and forth like a chicken with my head cut off just before we got on live on this on this live stream um because we just put up put out a blog post and i've got it up pulled up here for my day job as to what we're looking at with the solarwinds exploit on the orion software um i can't nor do i want to come out as if i'm some voice of authority um because there are some facts right and there are also some uncertainties yes it is a fact that's an absolute that we found the solar or fire eye fireeye credit to them the solarwinds orion software got beat up in a supply chain attack uh where it looked like one of the updates for the software the orion software was legitimate it looked like it was a trustworthy official thing from solarwinds but it was not it was a backdoor dll and some malicious activity that threat actors had actively been taking advantage of for some time now uh but it would blend in it looked like like the real thing it looked legit and the network activity that it was using to take advantage of the commanding control to do post-exploitation to continue operations it it looked like regular solarwinds network activity it was using like the orion information protocol or something that terrifies me because i i was a long time customer of solarwinds like i learned it inside now i deployed it to monitor my network and my systems and everything and i don't know how this would i would detect that like it you couldn't really i mean it's terrifying by the way um another youtuber here i am lucid popped in he says you look like edward snowden and how do you feel about that [Laughter] my government military background i can't i can't well you just look like him you don't have to go hide in russia dude just chill out [Laughter] anyways um so solarwinds hack let's get back on track here i know we lose focus um so ones got hacked they how did the hackers like so supply chain hack explain that to us real quick what does that mean so again i i might be either not getting everything every fact a thousand percent right so so i might be vague and fuzzy here so forgive me um and there are a lot of resources and articles and threat analysis uh articles already out in the emergency directive from from sizza that has that gets a lot more on the weeds that i could probably offer off the cuff here in a live stream uh how did this happen or what more is the supply chain attack we can understand that enough of solar winds was compromised that they were able to take advantage of that update system that orion the orion software would be using and that update that gets pulled down and i for some time it was still like publicly accessible on the internet all right some of the tweets and twitter is a crazy bubble for for infosec and cyber security folks uh they were doing a threat intel like live on twitter sharing screenshots of reverse engineering the dll and the hashes and the virustotal results dude yeah so it looks like it looked like something that would have came from the official good trusted source but it was bad and so that's that was a supply chain as as a blue teamer and i assume you have a blue team experience how what would you do to detect that because you kind of trust your vendors when they have that reputation you don't have scanning on for just updates you're supposed to update your stuff that protects you what do you do when your updates are nefarious like that's terrifying yeah and this was a tough thing because we saw this happen we were watching it unfold last night while it was occurring like seeing the tweets come through live seeing the emergency directive drop um and trying to understand and look at it the known hash right the shot 256 hash of this dll and you could see it in virustotal and maybe some in the chat could even kind of share the link there there was a time at midnight or one in the morning where virustotal had scanned it and zero engines detected got evil so no signatures no heuristics no one is it was literally a zero day that no one could find i i can't say a zero day because it's not like hey some exploit that that they're tossing over right right but yes in the sense that no one else had seen it before uh it you can't be able to wave your stamp and certificate around and say like hey we scanned it it's good it takes a lot more diving deep in the weeds that maybe a super smart analyst would have been able to pick up or look through and and we've been seeing throughout the night and throughout the morning suddenly okay after all the news broke now one engine detects it on virustotal and then three and i think now we're up to like 27 or 35 but tomorrow and we've already seen the washington post and we've already seen the new york times article uh this is going to flip this is this is big well i i'm reading uh the krebs and security article right now and it's listing the partial customer listing some of those customers we're talking about here at t uh my beloved cisco um federal express which is not good for the holidays uh texaco um sprint i mean just everyone uses solar winds it's an industry standard for doing everything now i haven't looked into it too much level three communications holy crap if you had that vulnerability if you had that update what kind of access are we talking about what could these hackers do so from what i understand uh solarwinds has a separate product in pool uh i think it's n central or their rmm or their remote management thing uh that is gonna end up being the agent on an endpoint that will be communicating back and forth and i am not a thousand percent positive as far as we know this the compromise that we see in the orion software is not in and central or solar winds but i i can't say with certainty right nothing nothing is an absolute here um so oh i may have completely just lost track of your original question it's fine you're not drinking coffee are you cause like i think that's a problem here i got some water beside me but that's about it no no see well i like the red team sticker there you need coffee that's that's the stream thing if you don't do it then you can't keep up with me man that's i'm on rocket fuel here i'm going a million miles an hour you're gonna you're gonna hate me i uh i am and not a coffee drinker but i do dabble a little bit in some like monster energy drink that's my that's my point i know i know i'm not the worst no you said poison it's literally poison you're killing yourself coffee is natural it's what we're gonna drink in heaven it's perfect um and it's it's it's what i'm i'm surprised and i'm shocked i'll have to uh i'll have to get some of your your network shot cause i will i will ship you some and my girlfriend is an avid coffee drinker so we we would certainly have some of it without a doubt i'll get you hooked up we gotta we gotta take care of this problem that's a vulnerability you have we're gonna patch that vulnerability uh so the question was solar winds uh what was the uh what what access did the hackers have so you covered that it wasn't the um which i think was your msp piece through ncentral the remote monitoring which that would be huge bad like that's that's right a lot of msps use that to monitor customers that would open up so many small businesses to medium-sized businesses um i know their orion platform was part of the vulnerable things so what could a hacker do if they had access to that so that does still grant them you know commanding control and access and compromise on that target so we try to think and we wonder what is the intent like is this going to be some data exfiltration is this going to be some cyber espionage thing are they going to try and pull files gather information are they going to drop ransomware just hose the whole thing take it down denial of service again we aren't we don't know and it's even reading through the firearm article and then the threat analysis it's this was conducted and done with serious operational security so there's nothing for sure um what could they have done certainly a lot with post-exploitation they could do as they please so i i guess the better question is we don't really know what they've done so far is that the scariest question i could ask i like to think so i admit yeah because what how long is this potentially been in there how slow what is what was the heartbeat how did they go undetected for so long right how long yeah yeah and that's that's scary uh so do we do we so we we definitely were able to find out there's an issue have we found out if there's anything they've done with it yet are there any any effects from this yet um like offensive adversarial bad effects yeah have they like stolen data have they dropped malware have they done anything like that yet or is it still kind of dormant i don't think or know we are that far out in the story just yet that's crazy man that's insane we are seeing obviously the everyone is on fire the world is ending the sky is following response and that we have new indicators of compromise we see ip addresses that are being used for the infected commanding control servers there are snort rules there are yarrow rules there are a lot of great defensive procedures and even including that emergency directive at some point we still boil down to the bare bone fundamental cyber security hygiene right the the security best practices that are stupid and we're bored of and tired of hearing but yeah use two-factor authentication man update your stuff patch things as the vendors release them you know you know well it's it's still amazing how many people don't do this i mean even just i.t professionals don't have that proper or change your password every once in a while have that two-factor authentication like do this it's certainly more difficult it's it's it's hard you have to it's it's annoying you have to do it i was just talking to some people from church the other day and i'm like explaining to them like they'd never heard it before too fast authentication like they just didn't get it i'm like you don't you're telling me you use the same password everywhere and you have no two factor oh like you're hacked like you're as far as i'm concerned you're done like you're toast you might as well just like it's insane uh real quick chat someone post in the chat if anyone here doesn't have two factor authentication let me know so we can we can shame you or at least get you to do it we'll do a quick security check paste your password and we'll decide if it's complex enough yeah real quick paste your username and password and what service it's for and we'll let you know if it's secure also your public address no please don't please don't that's a form of social engineering don't listen to me that's stupid don't do that um people would do it that's that's that's what i'm afraid of people would do it oh yeah oh anyways where were we so solar winds i i guess the scariest thing is we really don't know where we're at with that we know that it was vulnerable it was hacked and it affected the world but we don't know to what extent and it might be happenstance that google went down right around that time but i don't believe in a lot of coincidences so it scares me a little bit i mean i i would imagine google uses something to monitor the networks they might they probably have their own stuff but i would imagine pockets of google maybe in pockets of youtube probably use solarwinds i don't know i don't know i i don't mean to spread either intentionally or unintentionally of uh fear uncertainty and doubt uh i don't mean to be like some alarmist paranoid scaring people and that's not any what any of this is uh everything that i think we do and i want to do is to just make sure people are in the know and and make sure that people are aware and at least have an idea that this is out there uh and you can do your own homework if you're fascinated if you're interested if you want to learn a little bit or know more about it but uh i'm not trying to be all spooky scary doomsday you know well yeah and you don't want to do that right because that's that's never good for anyone but in reality dude i mean these are like we don't really know who's behind it yet but we think it's like russian threat actors like a coordinated like these are professionals who probably drive into the office every every like they're having their regular mondays and this is what their job is their daily job is just attacking us and that's crazy like this is what this is why we have people like you and hopefully me one day as i learn how to do basic crap um it is crazy they're throwing out i think like cozy bear or apt-29 or unc there's a tag unc for uncategorized because we just don't know that's terrifying now we covered a lot so far is there anything that you you feel like you want to say about hacking in general like because we we have probably in our audience a lot of people who are young new to i.t and they think hacking looks really flashy and cool what would you say to them right now um to kind of i guess do one of two things either encourage them to like buckle down and go deep or like to help them figure out if hacking is for them because i know a lot hacking can't be for everyone like it's it's a discipline and it's a certain art to where you have to kind of be detail-oriented you have to like digging through things and kind of tweaking stuff i don't think it may be for everyone so what's a good way to kind of weed yourself out and then dig deep once you figure out it's for you yeah i've beaten the dead horse about your passion and your drive and your interest because you want to you want it to be fun you want to say it's enough you can't say it enough i mean yeah it's an oversaturated answer but it is the answer uh but i will go one step further so it's not the classic cookie cutter thing uh i there there's a saying with offensive security and oscp and all these certs right there's a mantra to try harder and that i think has it has its place right because it it's telling you to bang your head against the wall it's telling you to suffer it's telling you to keep keep at it and and it's sometimes it sucks sometimes you want to ask someone for help and they're just like no gtfo rtfm try harder that might not be the answer that you want all the time and that kind of hurts sometimes i would turn that on its head and say it's not try harder it's keep trying or try again uh because persistence yeah there it's gonna i hate saying it's gonna be tough because it sounds so like cliche but no one ever talks about how much fail there is in hacking no one ever talks about how much failure you have to work through or go through to to improve yourself and to get better we hear like you mentioned the flashy high-flying crazy cool stuff being the elite cyber ninja warrior but no one ever talks about how much fail there is that's that's encouraging to hear because i imagine as people start going down that path um that's probably the first thing they meet is failure and i know it's for me too like man i'll watch some of these like uh um ctfs or even even like hack the box walkthroughs and i'm like how did that guy know how to do that i don't know anything like i've been an i.t for a minute i know networking i know how to build stuff i don't know what that guy just did like that's i i need to go back and study it's it's hard it's daunting and you have to take it one step at a time and be persistent you're exactly right um so now i had a question and i forgot so you know what i'm just going to switch over to um some user questions here if you if you got a moment for them here yeah absolutely let me uh refresh my page and i'll throw a few up here just give me a moment as i find it and here it is well first we just got a super chat saying thank you from lucas let me pull it up here oh thank you lucas happy to be hanging out with everyone this has been a pleasure it's been a real tweet he said you inspired me uh and i love my raspberry pi now so i think he's talking to me and probably you two because we're both inspirational figures here uh let's see i got a super chat from brody wilhelms i throw him up real quick he says love the content uh i think he said thanks for doing it let me see yeah keep it up um we already answered a sort of a question about certification let me see here give me advice this is from mahmoud give me advice i am new first python or learn hacking so i got a great question here where should you start should you learn python or just start hacking i i feel like i've said both of these and i know they conflict like dive in but you should learn python too you you have to do what you think is more interesting and fun so if you're learning python and you're watching video tutorials or you're following through in a book or if you're trying to sit through some lecture uh if your eyes glaze over and you're falling asleep and you're trying to check your pulse time to move on time to go do something else time to go do something fun that really fires you up so amen amen go break open hack the box go tinker with try hack me go do any of the plethora of war games uh and if you start to get to a point where you're racking your head against the wall okay let me bebop back to maybe some more of my study and maybe some more of my learning oh man that's good because i i i've been doing some studying for a cisco certification live on twitch every morning and people see this i'll go in with the intention of reading like this chapter of a book or something and like two paragraphs in them like i i hate this i'm done i'm bored i want to switch over to a lab so i can keep it fresh because you're you're only going to be productive as productive as you can be if your mind is just melting like if you're just not there so you got you got to keep yourself excited looking at the shiny new toy and now you learn so much that process so i guess to answer the question so python or hacking first and you're saying just bounce back and forth because you you need a good mix of theory and practical um you can't have one or the other you have both but you don't you want to make sure you're balancing your interest i know it's such a crappy answer but it's the answer no it's i mean it's a great answer i mean because when i tell people like they ask me what do i need to uh get my certification or learn a skill i say you need three things and you need these three different modalities as you learn get a good book get a a good lab and get a good video series because it uses like if you're bored to tears of the book well then watch someone really cool explain it to you on youtube like john hammond man um or go lab it up in one of john hammond ctfs speaking of which before we go any further where can people find you i mean obviously you're on youtube john hammond yeah yeah uh so just scroll past the jurassic park stuff and then you'll see him now youtube is kind of my main stage event uh i i love to push some of my content there uh i am on twitter i am on linkedin if you want to hang there as well um i don't dabble as much in like instagram or something i probably should i don't know how to i don't know how to get a hacking community on instagram you could be the first um we will start it together yeah instagram is is interesting i try to do all platforms because i never know what's going to be the best but it's always good to be everywhere cool so i'll put all your links below here in a bit thank you next question we got a super chat from george mateo and i think it's just a more love for us i respect both of you guys you guys are both awesome but at the end of the day john is my idol but chuck you are still the man very flattered thank you that's pretty funny i don't know chuck i think you got me beat man your your production quality your quality of videos you uh you're light years ahead of me my friend i appreciate it but i would much rather trade places with you and have your knowledge and all those alphabet soup certifications behind my name because that's some killer stuff man um anyways enough bromancing here let me find the super chat super chat from joseph frusky uh where'd it go i can't find it oh there it is joseph i found it um thanks to super chat joseph he says the python cert is that the microsoft technology associate and python cert you were talking about so this is earlier and this is the chat i was talking about so he's talk uh we've already answered the question it was that pcapp not the packet capture but the python thing i guess microsoft has a python certification i feel like i guess i i haven't even heard it yeah i'm pulling it up as well mta python oh cool it's one of their microsoft technology associate certifications it's introduction to python programming or introduction to programming using python i might have to look at that that's pretty cool that yeah that looks like reasonably priced too 127 i think if we're looking at the same page that's yeah that's okay yeah and microsoft i mean they're they have great certifications to this day and this is not having taken a legit hacking certification i'm sure osp is really fun but my favorite certification exam has been the microsoft azure certification it was super hands-on like they give you their their cloud portal you log in and they say configure this you can figure it and then they grade you it's so fun so fun um anyways back to looking at our super chats here uh dan xbox gave us one but he said testing.ctfs.games i don't know what that goes to oh thank you is that yours so i yeah i had mentioned earlier um that my myself and my team and our little rag tag group of hackers uh we're putting together some new infrastructure for hosting our own capture flag training environments and exercises um we hope to be doing one at the very end of the year with grim con and grim is another uh cyber security business and company uh that's putting together an annual security conference or they've been doing this for a little bit and they asked us hey can you host a ctf we're like yeah absolutely we'd love to we're flattered but we've made so many changes now that we like oh we would really like some folks to just kind of beta test how this new platform is going to look for us at a larger scale okay so on a whim we're like let's put on a test game like this wednesday and it's uh it's at testing.ctf.games ah ctf for hire i'm looking at it now hey load it quick right fingers crossed is that kubernetes i'm looking at or no not yet so it is uh kubernetes is is deploying the front end in its own container and uh as you are able to deploy your own challenges like on demand as if you were starting a lab like as if you were just spinning up a vm for you to like poke around at uh kubernetes will just drop you your own dedicated instance oh that sounds delicious that's amazing should be fun oh man that's cool that that sounds like another subject for another live stream but we can't we will rabbit holes like crazy um switch out from jared thank you for the super chat jared he says what would you recommend for an affordable open source laptop on the more entry level so i'm guessing someone's looking for a laptop to start using for hacking what would you say mr hammond an open source laptop i guess i admittedly haven't or i don't often hear those words together yeah i'm assuming they mean maybe a lot of people install linux on right yeah which can be any laptop so i uh if you're talking about a computer and you can obviously install linux on whatever you'd like i use a dell xps 15. and that is what i am actively using right now i'm a poor i don't know i don't have a desktop yet and i probably should at some point maybe for christmas who knows i'm working on a laptop right now but yeah build you build you a desktop dude it's the best thing ever and you can you can call it you can even make a youtube video about it expense it as a business thing make it your hacking desktop it's awesome um yeah for a laptop not a better question though do you need some beefy hardware to do hacking no like not at all so a lot of times you're going to be finding yourself working like in the command line right you're running command line tools you're running python that's uh you don't need you don't need a crazy graphics card to try and render the new call of duty game if you're working out of the command line uh i've seen all your stuff uh network chuck with your raspberry pi and hey i'm using that tiny little credit card circuit board to do some hacking like that's what twenty five dollars thirty five dollars yeah yeah i mean you can get out the door uh without you i mean of course they charge you for the power supply and all that but yeah like i think at the most 40 50 bucks and you've got an entire computer for hacking and it fits in your pocket that's awesome it's mind-blowing what it is i mean i i literally have one behind me on the wall that has a screen attached to it so you get it's all in one man i used it for my um starbucks hacking video which don't search for that because they told me to take their name off of it um yeah they reached out they said hey um cease and desist can you change all the information for us like take our logos out of the video and take our name out of the title like sure i'm scared to be starbucks don't come at me so i did what they said and then they gave me a gift card how nice so hey you know that's if that's a get out of jail free card if i've ever heard it because like you know here i'm trying to make it on youtube i'm like what's a good clickbaity title hacking starbucks yeah i'll get that don't do that they don't like that i would uh i would love to as we kind of talked about some other conversations we'd love to have together i'd love to pick your brain from the like the content creator perspective like how youtube is for you you know living in this kind of weird ecosystem that we've got here the burnout the imposter syndrome that i i struggle with i don't know about you oh all the time content creating is its own animal it's it's its own beast so that would be maybe an interesting topic too it very much would be because people are curious about it i i see people posting all the time like their youtube stats and talking about burnout and all this it's a real thing like oh yeah some days i'm like i just can't i can't i just i'm done sometimes i'll just take a week off and not talk to anyone because it's it's a lot being so public all the time and then making a fool of yourself which happens often for me as i'm see uh i envy people like you john because you you actually still do your what you talk about on youtube as a profession i don't i'm i'm not in the field and everything i talk about pretty much is something i learned yesterday so i'm always like imposter syndrome 24 7. but i'm sure in hacking you're always learning stuff new and you're always just talking about something fresh so i'm sure it applies to you as well not as much though now here's a question i i don't know anything about this but it says uh it's from toronto root they say what uh what do you think about hacking university have you heard about that i've never heard of that that that sounds very very vague and abstract there are a lot of things that might that might fit the criteria of hacking universe is that a book is that hacker usa is that like a coding boot camp let's see if we can let me see if they commented again if you got any or any more context around that uh let's see they also say that we are the best hackers in his opinion flattered me too i still got a lot to learn i gotta keep telling people and reminding people like look dude i've been doing this for five years and i'm gonna still be learning for the next 50 like i still consider myself a beginner there's a lot that i dude i want to get smart on too don't tell me that if you're a beginner then i'm just i'm still over here in diapers man i can't do anything um so hacking university i'm assuming they're talking about hacking in general for getting like a degree oh oh well maybe like so like i i'm searching hacking university some things i get up here are um like there's a university called aberte university and they have an ethical hacking degree what's your opinion on degrees [Laughter] college so this is quite a story um i mentioned i uh kind of got my feet wet in the u.s coast guard so i went to the u.s coast guard academy um and that's one of those kind of big wacky military service academies right between like west point or annapolis and all that and typically in that you graduate and you commission and you're going to go be an officer and go do military things in that military service i am not in the coast guard so i didn't graduate uh but i got my four years of experience in education and learning uh i have a transcript with four years worth of college and education but i don't have a bachelor's um interesting so you went through the pain of all that don't have the paper but you have the knowledge i'm curious how that treated you well so it's it's interesting and it's a blessing in disguise as i have immediately found out uh but i studied electrical engineering at the coast guard academy that was my undergraduate it was not in computer science it was not in cyber security primarily because the coast guard didn't have any of those things but i i go to say that in that educ formal education in in cyber security and ethical hacking isn't always there for one thing at all and if it is there it might not be the best it might not get it might not teach you everything that you want or need to know uh that you would be doing if you were to explore and tinker and play on your own with those capital flag games with those activities war games hack the box try hack me um you fill in the your own gaps so i and i've heard you have those conversations with nomsec and stoke is like formal education college school yeah i don't care i don't want that we're all in good company uh so definitely from the the uh the information and learning perspective that makes sense and i totally agree with that what i don't know about and you i maybe have more insight on this is do employers care about that if someone's looking to hire someone as a pen tester or a red team or do they care if you have a degree or not so it totally depends and it's super subjective and that's a crappy answer i know as usual but uh when i was in the military federal government contracting end of the world they do care about those certifications and those experience and those education and degrees and etc uh if just to get through hr as we've discussed right i think what you'll find if you find a good spot a really really awesome gig an incredible warm welcoming company that you want to hey sign your hat or hang your hat up on with they don't care like if you prove your merit if you can show them that you're a rock star on the keyboard that you love your stuff and you're passionate about it they're like heck yeah dude we got open arms i don't care if you have a degree or squat and that bleeds perfectly into our next super chat question from um ashraf jalal and i i know i butchered that now i'm sorry but thank you for the super chat he says what advice do you have for trying to land your first role in cyber security so i'll do more stories if that's okay yeah no stories add so much depth to what we're doing right now so bring it on man my first job in cyber security was as a teacher and as an instructor which makes no sense right no no what you can't do teach right yeah like oh that was good no so i i was originally with the cyber training academy uh the dod cta to teach cyber threat emulation and penetration testing to get uh some of our operators on keyboard doing the real stuff being a hacker powershell penetration testing python medicine and how the crap did i land that as my first job that sounds i thought it was like hey this is incredible this thing just landed in my lap but the thing is my actual answer to your question now that i've got that background out of the way perfect have a portfolio and yeah your resume is one thing sure you've got a piece of paper that tells you a little bit about yourself but you want to be able to bring them your github that you have x 000 projects or a dozen or so things that you've hacked on or open source contributions you want to have your website where you can showcase these are the cool applications that i've built hey i've got a couple cves to my name i found some bugs and i've i've got exploits that are are really written and fleshed out and i've i've done stuff with this um sometimes that's hard to do i i will admit yeah for someone looking for their first job that would that sounds pretty daunting at least from my perspective um what about like uh would it be weird or would it look bad to put maybe try hack me or hack the box walkthroughs on your i i guess on your website or make videos and like maybe have it on your resume would that be silly or stupid you know i'm super glad you asked because that is exactly what i what i would advocate for i totally tell people like dick don't be afraid to put your try hack me standing your hack the box rank like in your resume like sharing those write-ups sharing uh your video solutions maybe you've got your own growing budding youtube channel or you're just trying to spread the wealth you're trying to share the knowledge that i think people really like you're active in the community you go to security conferences you try to talk and speak and give presentations you network you volunteer anyone can do that that's awesome i think that's great i hope that kind of answers your question that that's how i landed my first role in cyber security is that hey i've got a silly youtube channel where i talk about the stuff way too often and i i can't i tell everyone that in like every area of it it was networking or cloud or whatever that's the secret sauce if you can just start documenting your process get a blog and whatever your medium is just do it and that speaks so much just even on linkedin alone linkedin has some cool features now where you can add videos and you create your own little articles man such a killer way to do it um super chat from and this is someone who actually hangs out with me in the mornings when i do my twitch streams fairly odd streams he says and we kind of already covered this but let's get a succinct answer right now what cert do i get first oh succinct answer you might tell me pentest plus um i'm not sure yet i'm not sure i hate that every single answer has like a caveat you should do this but on the opposite hand you shouldn't do that at all the little lawyer answer like well it depends [Laughter] i would love to tell people ejpt i'd love to tell people that junior penetration testing cert from elearn security uh i realized that that has a price tag on it and that might be too much of a price tag for some folks but that gets you hands-on that gets you on the keyboard that gets you practical doing it for real uh security plus that gets you the more conversational theoretical know-how to be able to have the conversation know the lingo and everything it depends what you're interested in what you want what would you like to be more of an operator on the keyboard or would you just like to be able to speak the language so i see a good chat come by in it the answer is always it depends [Laughter] absolutely i think i think yeah it does depend what i always tell people like for especially for certifications like i think if you're trying to land a job what i would say is look in your area do a quick search for those certifications see if any particular job is looking for those certifications in your area what does it come up with if there are a lot for ejpt go for that if there are a lot for security plus they're looking for entry level people go for that you want it you want to get past those hr hr uh check boxes um anyways no we have two additional questions that are kind of piggybacking on what we just talked about uh one from john kaiser let me just throw him his name up in lights because he did give me a super chat he said uh do you recommend going to school for cyber security or being self-taught and getting the certifications which kind of already answered right and john what would you say it's weird i would actually say go to school for cyber security oh man i'm confused now i know super confusion right i would say go to school for cyber security if you can uh if it's completely easy if it's if money is no object if time is not a concern whatever the case may be if it's if it's convenient maybe that's the better way to put it if going to school is convenient and painless do it so that you've got that notch on your belt so you've got that stupid line in your resume and that's done it's it's out it's off the out of the way if you can't being self-taught is what i would advocate for all the way and supplement what you might be learning in school with being self-taught getting certifications again you don't have to but if it's convenient you should why not i like that that's good um because i always say uh college is stupid uh but you're right in in many cases having a degree is really necessary um so if you have the opportunity to do that do it you you get that checkbox no matter where you go you're good you're good you have um that's good advice and then same question over here from scorpion86 is a college degree worth getting in getting to break into cyber security and you said yes so that's good if it's easy if it's convenient it doesn't have to be that route yeah because i mean goodness if you if you're trying to like work three jobs to pay for college just get that degree uh that might not be worth it for you there's a much cheaper path a more knowledgeable path a more beneficial path outside i was looking at i was looking at your stream with nomsec and you guys were just like complete waste of money completely just like go burn your diplomas right now you could spend that money on great learning resources and war games and practice you can buy that massive open source laptop you can do whatever you want another question from fairly odds dreams thank you he says where uh where should i go after i guess he's using irony so where should i go after the ine course you know elearn was bought by ine which by the way guys i'm doing on my giveaway starting tomorrow and elearn is one of the things i'm giving away so keep that in mind um so i guess really the question is where do you go after ejpt and all the elearn certifications which how do you that's a great question actually how do you mix and match vendors would you stick with one or kind of get your osp over here and go for an elearn security certification over here i struggle with that because at the end of the day a lot of them are very very similar that's like sure i have my oscp but it's practically equivalent to my ecppt which is practically equivalent to my g pen which is practically equivalent etc uh and we we joke sometimes about a cert warrior right where you have like two dozen to your name uh i hope i'm not that far down the rabbit hole yet but i hope i'm not that far where do you go after i e or do you bebop around honestly they i think they present the learning material in a different way the labs that they offer the exercises and the training is it going to be presented in a slide show like a power point you've just drawn through is it going to be an interactive video sort of thing if you are at the point in your mind where you're saying all of these look the same how do i choose okay go for what's convenient right again the cheap option that might be realistic for you and what suits your learning style best and yeah yeah i think that's yeah you hit the nail on the head because not every um certification path is going to have a ton of resources that you can pick from like elearn i don't know what resources are out there except for what maybe in e or elon created for it so you're very limited whereas oscp i mean you got their official courseware from pwk but you also have try hack me and hack the box and heath adams and all these people who make content that can help you along the way so you've got options so that's that's an interesting interesting perspective on that um we got a super chat from joseph frisky bruce rushki i'm going to struggle with that name forever i did cyber security in the army now teaching at a top engineering high school in nyc i would love to tell you how cyber is being taught to teenagers real cool so i guess more of a comment i would love to hear that how cyber security is being taught to high schoolers right now which i would have killed for in high school i i didn't know a thing about was going on when i was in high school did you have a high school program for um it john oh we had uh we had one course when i was in high school called video game development and they taught game maker the the yoyo games little tool and program which was cool and fun and neat uh but not anything like what i do right now and that's what i was saying even at school at college uh when we talked about it that's nothing that i use in my current day-to-day life um i i would absolutely love to know though how it is being taught for high schools in in new york that sounds incredible i hope i hope they're doing it right and i hope that you would be happy with what's what's going on yeah yeah and the beauty of it is i i we have youtube now we have so many resources where people like yourself and heath adams and and namsack and and stoke and all these people are doing amazing content everywhere and it's not hard to you don't have to go very far to learn something amazing and start labbing things so that's i think goodness if i could go if i could be a teenager now i'd probably still be playing video games but i would like to think that i'd maybe stop for a second and do some of this cool stuff as well um i do want to if that's all right to like foot stomp or emphasize or spotlight that a little bit more if you find yourself at the age the ripe ages of your teenage years or whatever uh if you don't have any other responsibilities and life commitments and obligations that take away your time all you have is time and you can use that to do so so much i i miss the days i miss the nights when i was locked up in my room just playing war games and learning and it was raw and i i could afford to play you know see i never like what i did and i'm probably i truly share this experience with most people is i didn't do any of that i just played call of duty until i fell asleep on my couch at 6am and then i slept all day went to work and then repeat i didn't do anything with my life at that point so um so other philosophical question i suppose do you still game a little bit now i know we were like throwing it i know we were throwing shade but like when we talk about hey my burn out our our struggles of doing all the stuff that we do i'll i'll admit it sometimes i'll like okay an hour if i can at night sometimes i'll i'll play super smash brothers or something just to chill out just to detox like and that's that's essential and i absolutely game i love gaming i play call of duty i like assassin's creed i might pick up cyberpunk 2077 but i think the key difference is you have to find the balance and i use gaming as a as a reward system for myself i can't game unless i've done something i can't game unless i've studied or just done some work or if i'm just like so stressed out from what i've been doing all the time i just have to take a day and just game and veg out use it like that just don't let it just totally take over your life which i i'm sure we both know some people who do that um but yeah gaming i love it dude you just gotta be careful with the double edges well i think that's a good way to put it though yeah use it as a reward for your own hard work yeah it's it's easy to let gaming just take over i mean they make these games to be addictive which is why i love game gamifying um hacking is cool because if they make it a little bit addictive give you that reward system then before you know it they're tricking you into learning which is fantastic you have to give that initial hurdle of motivation motivation's even a factor you're just having fun that's what i love about it um super chat from austin says learn go or python and why so python is a scripting language right which means it is interpreted and requires an external program to be able to run it to be able to execute that code uh go is a compiled language that can be bundled up into an executable that can run on windows or on linux or on whatever other platform you'd like and go is super duper fast right it's it's crazy good at concurrency and it can do a lot of things uh in parallel or spread out or in mass execution which is which is cool um i said that weird and i don't like how that came out no it's fine it's fine i was tagging along for it it's good all right um in python it's a little bit easier to read it's a little bit easier to write uh you might not have the speed or the power that you do and go but you can rapidly prototype and just crank out code not like how you might and go um so if you're looking to solve a problem on uh end point or an operating system that requires a native executable or a program that can run standalone as is you want go if you can get python onto that system like it's it's not installed default on windows it is installed by default on on linux usually most of the time almost always right okay just those those caveats and things in mind when you're choosing whichever one you might like pros and cons to each i do love that go is inherently cross-platform and it's super duper fast but it's another learning curve yeah it sounds like for the purposes of hacking it sounds like python is definitely the way to go the way to go don't do that um but yeah i think python is better unless you want to yeah like what you said if you're trying to solve a problem uh it sounds more like programming to me more holistic programming than actually just scripting um super chat we're gonna keep going because people are like oh they're gonna answer questions so let's throw some super chats in here uh saber from uh belgium he says hi from belgium working as a sock engineer what resources would you recommend to get better a better understanding of the offensive part and get better at sock so i guess he's more of an obviously sock is more defensive more blue team so what can he do to get better offensive which i think we've already answered this question in a variety of ways but i guess pointed answer sure um there are exercises and activities called open sock that showcase different uh technologies like using malloc or using kibana or using gray log and working through with splunk queries or whatever you might like and that is an incredible awesome exercise to be able to practice and to explore uh for the the defensive blue team acting as a sock um one other great resource that i will if uh i will spread and send some love to the sans holiday hack challenge or kringlecon right now is running and they do a fantastic job of pouring in some cool offensive like adversarial stuff but they'll also try and pour in some defensive stuff so splunk is in there this year and it was this past year that's running right now if you want to go check it out the sands holiday hack challenge i've been playing and it's been a ton of fun so goodness yeah there's so many things to hacking this is a big world i'm having fun discovering it um isn't it like a little like an endless abyss at the very same time yeah it's like i feel like okay i've got a handle on what's out there wait there's something else oh now i just fell off a cliff i have no idea what's going on then i'm just i'm forever a noob is that is that really just what it is just forever a noob because i'm always gonna never know what i'm doing um super chat from defury i'm just gonna try and get through these real quick uh what what resources would you suggest to learn python in the past chuck has mentioned codecademy which is what i i do use to learn python and initially kind of a getting started but do you have and i'm curious myself what would you use right now to learn python the way that i learned python was watching tutorials on youtube well they're in the right place yeah right so the new boston i don't know if anyone actually knows that or bucky roberts or greg roberts uh he produced a lot of stuff years ago um and i had learned through his video tutorials and then i had this silly idea like hey i want to do something else i want to do that too i want to give back to the community i'll try and make some some youtube tutorials on stuff like this so there is an abundance of free resources there is an abundance of free tutorials and video guides and if that's the way you learn you can get all upon that um i i don't think you need to pay for it i don't think you do google is your friend yeah and i really i think that goes for anything in it you don't have to pay for anything like all the information's out there everything's been talked about it's just not curated and it's not right into a nice pretty path with something like honestly i love the nice pretty path i love that because you have to think about it sometimes you spend more time trying to find what you need than actually doing and learning what you need so i i personally love codecademy because i just put it there for you here learn this this this and this okay i don't have to think about it uh if money were an issue you don't have to do any of that you can find all the amazing stuff on online if you don't i mean gosh you can literally do anything for free on the internet it's amazing um so we got a few more super chats and then i know i'm i'm tired and you're not even running on coffee so i'm you're probably tired as well uh here's one super chat from uh i think it's g-y-t-i-s j-jutis i don't want to pronounce that wrong let's throw it up here real quick it says uh love the stream and advice given you guys are inspiring keep it up what was the most memorable experience from hacking adventures good question so i'm sure you have some stories mr john hammond uh what's the most memorable you have so this is going to get kind of distilled down to our uh play pretend game scenario right with capture the flag uh i've already kind of shared some cool memories where it's like oh i'm i'm learning something new that i saw at work i'm like wow this is really cool this is really nice um i have an incredible amount of opportunities that have opened up for me because of this sort of thing um being able to hang out with you network truck being able to be on plenty other events and streams and meet incredible people that is is one absolute blast uh they they flew me to like london to be a part of the google capture the flag finals day and that was it wasn't even like as a participant which was the craziest thing it was like hey you're a friend you're just a guy you're someone in the scene that loves to talk about the stuff and we share it online on youtube and that was such an incredible experience so that that's great that is not though what is one of my most memorable experiences um it was in the trenches playing to capture the flag event with my friends you know with the with the guys and girls to the left to my right when we were just hacking away at our keyboard uh and there's like what 30 minutes left in the competition and we're like neck and neck or we know like hey if we were to solve one more challenge if we were to just break through one more technique one more attack we could win and it's like okay whatever prize or whatever i remember when we would find the foothold or like we would get something right we'd get the breadcrumb and we would just crank out whatever we need to in the moment and it's just adrenaline rush it's so much energy when we're like oh we did it we did it and it feels like a sports team it feels like you just like chest bump your buddies because oh we won those are irreplaceable moments those are uh it's weird because like i don't know i don't know about you when you mention hey we don't really watch sports i'm not all into the whole throw the ball thing i don't know i don't even work yet no and i think seeing that camaraderie and that friendship and just be like the success and the achievement is such a great cool thing that i hope a lot of people get to get to play with that's what i'm hoping to i mean you see like esports take on a new life and it's becoming so common and so big and we're seeing real money being thrown at it i don't see this being much different and i think it could really attract some people into this industry and and find a foothold um that's really cool i i hope to be able to participate in things like that and feel like i'm hacking but along with the teammates that's that's just sounds so fun um super chat from daniel sprayberry he says he's in the dod field and with security plus and working on his cysa plus and doing some casual hack the box what's next for me ejbt or oscp or something else okay yeah let me lay it down um if you want oscp like if you know you want oscp if that is your end goal and if you're like oh what should i take to prepare for oscp or what other certification should i should i use to prep or how do i know when i'm ready when when will i know that i that i'm that i'm ready to do this when will i know you're never gonna know there's there's no big flashing red sign that you can now successfully take and pass and complete the oscp and then that you have like that validation and confirmation if you know you want the oscp at some point go for it like just sign up and spend the time in the labs schedule the test i i like to personally schedule the test as soon as possible because otherwise that you just make sure you're gonna study make sure you're gonna do it that's good and you just hold yourself to it and if you take the test and you fail that's okay like that's totally okay because now you have already exposed yourself to it you've already got acquainted with it you're already familiar with it and now you know like oh crap this is the stuff that i really sucked at and i need to improve and now i know where my weaknesses are for the exact goal and ending achievement that i want because you just jumped in you just went for it don't hold yourself back don't wait until you're ready for it if you know you want it go for it that's great advice and what i love about the oscp that other certifications i don't really do this and i haven't experienced this is when you when you buy the voucher to do that they give you all the training included it's it's not cheap but what you get is crazy but they force you to schedule your lab time like you have to immediately do that and then you you have a limited amount of time to schedule your exam that will expire so you have you have a time crunch either way the day you put down money for that and i love that because otherwise you just kind of sit on it forever putting that in there is good people need that i need that that's crazy what um so a lot we're gonna do one more super chat and we'll kind of close this out um it's from john rogers i have a chance to take the sans courses with my gi bill i will get the g sec and the gcih and one elective which is one elective which is better as an elective g pen or g-w-a-p-t did you you may have all these and i couldn't keep track of all that which is better so uh i i have taken some sans courses um i am blessed to have ed scotus as the original instructor for the sans 560 network penetration testing and ethical hacking course but i have not sat for any of the gayac certification exams so admittedly i take that with a grain of salt i don't have any guy excerpts i don't have g pen gcih gwapped the best thing that i can tell you to choose from those two which one is a better or the best elective g wapped is going to be about web application pen testing hence the name right so you're going to be looking at websites and applications and cross-site scripting and sql injection and dns etc the stuff that makes the web work and how you can use and abuse it um g-pen is going to be talking about penetration testing and that's going to talk a little bit more about the life cycle it's going to talk more about okay what is initial access what does that mean what do you do once you have it can you do some lateral movement how do you do that do you pivot do you proxy tunnel do you port forward privilege escalation cracking hashes doing your post compromise stuff if that is something that you're more interested in you can go for that i just gotta say those are very different things uh and that's why i can't exactly tell you which is better or which is best because they're just apples and oranges you you gotta go for which one you like either way pretty awesome that you're taking some sans courses i'm super jealous those are fantastic and they're stellar so good good on you those are pretty expensive aren't they like those are very expensive so that's why you're jealous um yeah that makes sense that makes sense well guys um that's about it for now i know we have some other super chats coming in but we only have so much time dude we can only talk for what two and two and a half hours now good yes so seriously john thank you so much for coming on and spending so much time with us i know i've learned a ton and i hope everyone else i know they did i know they learned a ton from you um again you can find john on youtube twitter it's john hammond ignore the jurassic park stuff and i'll put links below for all of the stuff go subscribe he's putting some awesome stuff out there you recently did the try hack me advent of cyber like yours was yesterday right where you had this whole thing going on so go it's free go check that out and i'll be giving away some try hack me stuff this week as well so be looking for that um yeah that's all we got any closing words of encouragement or anything at all mr john hammond uh hey thank you thank you thank you again and again this has been incredible and surreal for me i'm fanboying a little bit right you know so uh this has been a real pleasure and a real a real treat so thanks so much for having me with you uh for everyone else yeah those words of advice and those wisdom keep trying try again and change your mentality to just play and tinker because that's the fun stuff keep doing the fun stuff excellent keep trying and keep doing the fun stuff i feel like every one of those things could be printed on a t-shirt or a coffee mug that's awesome anyways guys appreciate you watching and hang out with us the whole time here and uh again go follow john and we'll have to have them on again to talk about something else maybe as i get further into the hacking journey we can have more in-depth topics and maybe do some ctfs and stuff i don't know we'll see anyways yeah that's all i got guys i'll catch you guys next time [Music] [Music] so [Music] again [Music] my friends [Music] [Music] oh [Music] come on [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] again wake up [Music] oh y'all thought i was done hold on i gotta echo here man like any good marvel movie we gotta do end scene credits right i mean we still got 450 people here you thought i was done but i'm not done um can y'all hear me by the way hope you can hear me cause i'm talking uh thanks for hanging out with me guys john hammond's a b sydney holy crap dude's amazing goodness i love having these hacker guys on here because they make me look stupid but they are they are geniuses like seriously so shout out to him if you haven't followed him dude go follow him right now all of you right now like i'm not kidding i'm gonna post it in the chat right now now the reason i come back on here is to give away some coffee um i'm gonna post it again john hammond go follow and subscribe to john hammond right now uh but i'm gonna give away some coffee right now let me get it uh spun up real quick didn't have it prepped and i'll be giving away coffee throughout the week network chuck 10 days of christmas is officially starting tomorrow crazy giveaways dude like i i can't believe i got people to give away what's happening what's being given away so buckle your freaking seatbelt it's gonna be amazing anyways coffee right now let me get the gift card ready it's gonna be a gift card for 20 bucks to use on networkchuck.coffee getting it set up now blah blah blah blah blah blah there we go it's all set up so i'm gonna post the code in the chat right now it's gonna go quick dude it's gonna go freaking quick are y'all ready so networkchuck.coffee networkchuck.coffee get your cart ready 20 bucks if you go in there and there's only three dollars left that means you missed it you missed it but you can still use that ready set now i'm just i'm going slow because aaron shannon said that it's always a bit delayed i don't want to get people behind i just posted it it's there use it go fast that's the code um yeah let me know who else you want to have on and be looking for the videos coming up it's going to be really fun i can't wait to give away all this stuff to help you out to get you guys motivated and excited inspired just to go and kill it yeah and uh my wife told me dinner was ready about an hour ago so i need to go um oh and my exams tomorrow i'm taking my ccmp encore 10 15 tomorrow i'll be live on twitch in the morning uh and a shout out to michael reeves do you guys know michael reeves uh michael reeves is uh somebody got the coffee lock greaves is a fellow youtuber much bigger than me he's got 5 million followers and he makes crazy like engineer videos about chairs that throw you out of your chair uh he was streaming on twitch and then he he just raided me which i didn't know was the thing didn't know what it was and he dropped 17 000 followers in my ch my stream super cool dude apparently he watches the channel which is really cool so shout out to michael reeves appreciate it and i saw lucy come on i am lucid big fan of yours man so thanks for coming by yeah so um that's all i got keanu reeves no no no michael reeves it's where it's at michael reeves okay i'm tired i'm hungry i haven't eaten all day i've been fasting catch you guys later [Music] [Music] so [Music] long and following [Music] my friends [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] so [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] feel comfortable [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: NetworkChuck

Views: 559,851

Keywords: cyber security, ethical hacking, how to hack, learn hacking, hacking tutorial, cyber security training for beginners, how to become a hacker, cyber security career, cyber security course, cyber security analyst, cyber security engineer, cyber security jobs, cyber security degree, cyber security certifications, cyber security tutorial, john hammond

Id: wIn3L24lksI

Length: 147min 50sec (8870 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020