The onion that makes NSA cry Now that we’ve answered “Why Tor?”, let’s take a look at how Tor actually works. Consider the game of treasure hunt. You start off with a clue and that clue sends you somewhere. …

Let’s talk about Tor (The Onion Routing Project), a secure anonymizing network that aims to offer privacy, and hence protection, to anyone who needs it for any reason. First of all, let’s clarify some jargon: Clearnet: Clearnet refers to the unencrypted, unsecured non-Tor internet. This is what people think of as the ‘normal’ internet, the traditional worldwide web. In clearnet, any website you visit knows your IP address and you reach the website in the first place by…

The power of the analogy When you’re learning something new, you usually have no context for it. That’s part of the problem. You have no way of connecting these foreign concepts to anything you already understand. And that’s why I love using analogies. Here are just a few of the analogies I use in my…

We’ve all done it before. You get into something for a few weeks, read a few articles, learn a few things, and then… it fades away… You lose interest — move on to the next thing. You forget what you learned. For me, it’s been a lot of things over…

Just the other day, a fellow STCer (Self-Taught Coder) asked me the following question: “How do you go about understanding someone else’s code? I am starting to feel more comfortable with my own code, but whenever I try to look at something someone else wrote I feel totally lost. I…

All systems are go Now that we’ve got a good understanding on the what DDOS is, let’s take a look at how it’s practically done. Most servers are built to handle a fairly large bandwidth and even the smaller ones can give maximum speeds to several hundreds of clients. Keeping this in mind, it…

If you rely on other’s code, you’ll always be a noob Programming is a vast field. Even after years of experience, a programmer is always bumping into new things. That’s part of what makes it so exciting, you can always find something new to do, possibilities are endless. …

Practice is everything Now you should be ready to fire up Metasploit. Metasploit should already be installed on the machine that you’re using(Windows or Linux), so to start the console, simply run “msfconsole”. Before getting to exploits straight away, it is useful to understand what some Metasploit commands do. Below are some of…

Hit them where it hurts Exploitation is the main course. This is what you’ve been waiting for. This is where we need to use everything we have learned during the information-gathering phase. Exploitation is the most exciting part of the penetration testing process where you actually get into the system of your target and have…