HACKINT

Earlier today I wrapped up teaching the first ever HACKINT course – Fundamentals of Hacking.  Ten students from various Squadrons across Ramstein Air Base, Germany came together to take part in the two day course.  As it was the first ever offering of the class there were definitely some speed bumps and issues that had to be resolved on the fly.  Luckily, I had Eric Trombly as my assistant instructor and technical director to help me out.  He was critical in teaching the students about Openvas, helping the students in configuring their systems, and answering random Linux questions (his specialty).  All in all it was a great experience and I was really impressed with the students.

The course started out by covering the ethics and legality of hacking (over and over again).  From there students learned how to use and configure BackTrack 5 Live cds before moving on to installing BackTrack as the OS on the computers in the lab.  Eric and I then taught the steps to the Hacker Methodology before moving on to teaching about nmap, the power of the command line vs. GUIs, and then about  Openvas and various regex commands.  The course culminated in giving students hands on hacking experience with using BackTrack against Vulnerable Machines that I set up on my personal server.  I taught the students how to look for vulnerable services, pick out the best exploits, and gaining a remote shell on their targets.  The students then moved into cracking passwords, capturing screenshots of compromised computers, and gaining an understanding of privilege escalation and pivoting. Honestly, for a fundamentals class this was a huge information dump for the students yet they excelled at every turn.  More than that, they were patient with me as I had to overcome various issues (for example a Windows 98 VM proved to be much more of a challenge than it ever should have been).

The students gave me a lot of positive and constructive feedback for making the course better.  For example, I’ll be working on creating some demo videos, screenshots of examples, and step by step instructions for various sections instead of the less organized approach to teaching I tried.  As much as the students learned over these past two days I equally learned about teaching.  I have to admit it was a joyous and proud moment to be able to teach this class.  I’m looking forward to offering it again soon.

Overall, Eric and I were very impressed with the students’ work and the conversations they had.  I was personally inspired to see how eager they were to take the information back to their Squadrons and peers.  These skills will not only allow them to hack machines and develop a niche of their own but to do so ethically and ultimately become better network defenders.  On the morning of the second day I started off the class with Johnny Long’s “No-Tech Hacking” DEFCON 15 talk; as I heard the students laugh and enjoy the video it became obvious that we have some future hackers on our hands.

Eric Trombly teaching at HACKINT's first class

Robert Lee teaching at the first HACKINT class