Overview of the CEH Certification Program:

Overview of the CEH Certification Program. So I’m a real big movie buff. I love movies, I love finding quotes, I love trivia about movies, and one of my favorite quotes, I know you’re going to be shocked, it doesn’t really come from an action film. You would think something like, I’ll be back, would be one of my favorite quotes, but it’s not. It’s from a film starring Tom Hanks and Geena Davis. I’ll give you a little trivia and see if you can figure out what that is, 1990s. It was called A League of Their Own, and in it Tom Hanks delivers one of the best lines I’ve ever heard. Geena Davis gets really tired or really difficult. There’s a relationship thing going on with her sister, her husband is coming back from the war, and she’s leaving the team, and Tom Hanks and her have this big argument. And in the middle of the argument, he says why are you quitting? And she says I’m quitting because it got too hard. And here comes the line. He says, “If it wasn’t “hard”, everyone would do it… “Hard” is what makes “it” great. ” Now I’m not going to pull any punches here folks. The CEH examine is not that easy, and it’s not designed to be that easy, but once you take the exam you’re going to have to keep up on that certification, so in this module we’re going to go through and talk about this whole CEH certification program. We’ll go through and talk about what the certification brings you. We’ll also take a look at how to maintain your certification. This is not a one shot pony here. You’re going to have to, that’s the wrong acronym, but you get the idea. You’re going to have to maintain this certification. You don’t just take the exam once and go oh, I’m done. And then we’ll go through and take a look at what’s expected of you. There are some high expectations. I have some high expectations of you.

Installing and Configuring Your Windows Server VMs:

So you remember that time that you decided to go ahead and install that piece of software without doing your backup, and afterwards you went, what the crap did I just do? Well, that’s the same concept here. We’re going to go through in this module of installing and configuring your Windows Server virtual machines, so that you can use these as targets in your practice without affecting production environment machines. Now this is going to be pretty simplistic step-by-step of how to install your Server 2008 R2 and 2012 R2 boxes. We’ll go through and show you how to install the OSs. After we install the operating systems, we’ll want to go through and then make sure that we configure some services a specific way. And these may not be the exact way that you would have your services run in the production environment, but our goal here isn’t necessarily to lock down these machines, it’s to see what are the possibilities that an attacker can do and see on your network. So we’re going to go through and configure, and in some cases we’re going to enable and disable certain features. Again some of those features you may or may not have turned on or off, or one of the main things we’re going to do is go and turn off the Windows firewall. And I know that’s kind of interesting to think about, but typically when we talk about turning off a firewall that’s a bad thing, but yet it’s really strange, no matter where I go it seems like everybody turns this bad boy off. We’re going to make sure it’s turned off so again we can be able to connect easily into these machines. And then we’re going to go through and create user accounts, and those user accounts we’ll create on every single machine that we create for our lab environment. So let’s get going.

Installing and Configuring Your Desktop VMs:

Now I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking Dale I’ve got my servers, what else do I need? Well, typically an attacker is going to go after one of your desktop machines first in order to make his way into your servers. So we’re going to go through in this module here and look at how to install and configure your desktop virtual machines. Now those desktop machines are going to include Windows 8. 1, Windows 7, and Kali. So we’ll take you through one at a time and show you how to install those. The reason why we have Windows 7 and Windows 8. 1 is to show you that the tools may or may not work on certain platforms, as well as these could be targets themselves and what you need to look at. Kali itself is actually just an operating system that is used for pen testing, and we’re going to be using it to actually do the pen test. So after we install the OSs, we’ll then go through and show you how to, just like our servers, we’re going to go through and disable and enable certain features, just so that it works the way that we want it to work in the lab so you can see the demonstration or the theory. We’ll also go through, you remember those user accounts? Yeah, see you’re getting hooked on some characters now aren’t you? We’re going to go through and create those same accounts on these boxes. We won’t create it on the Kali box, we’ll actually just use a root account. And we’ll talk about the root account briefly when we get there. And then afterwards, it’s extremely important that you at least watch the housekeeping section. The housekeeping section, we’ve got some things we need to go through and do. Basically it’s making some snapshots to make sure that we can come back if we goof something up, as well as making sure that we reactivate all the machines so we get some additional time with those trial OSs. So let’s go fire up some more VMs.

Attack Types:

Attack Types. So, I’m a big fan of Sun Tzu who wrote the book, “The Art of War, ” and in it he says, “Invincibility lies in the defense, the probability “of victory lies in the attack. ” So, the concept here is understanding your attack types. We’re going to go through and take a look at several different attack types. What usually happens is that most techniques and tools that you’ll come across are used for locating different vulnerabilities. They’re used to compromise the system. They’re used for running exploits and once the vulnerability is located on a machine, the attacker can then go through and exploit the vulnerability and install his own malicious software. Now things like backdoors or root kits or Trojans, these are all forms of malicious types of software or what we refer to sometimes as malware and malware gets installed on a exploited. Now some of the most common methods that attackers use on application servers and database servers include things such as a buffer overflow or an SQL injection, and we’ll talk about those a little bit later on. In fact, we’ll actually get into those. We have whole dedicated modules just on SQL injection and buffer overflows, but what we want to do is go through and take a look at the different categories of attacks. The categories of attacks typically fall within the following five areas: an Application attack; we’ll take a look at that, discuss what it does. We’ll also take a look at Misconfiguration attacks. We’ll then look at our Shrink-wrap code attacks, our Operating System attacks, and then finally, we’ll go through and look at the different entry points that attackers will use to implement these types of attacks.