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Ask HN: What do I need to learn to be useful as a hacker to defend my country?

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11–20 of 56 posts

Re: Ask HN: What do I need to learn to be useful as a hacker to defend my country?

#11

The time to start a campaign against Russia on behalf of Ukraine was weeks ago. It’s too late now, like calling up the national guard hours before a massive shock and awe blitzkrieg campaign. Zelensky should have been making these appeals a long time ago but was delusional.

That seems harsh, Russia was actively looking for any excuse and those might be good enough. The fact they still attacked could look obvious now but that’s hindsight.

Re: Ask HN: What do I need to learn to be useful as a hacker to defend my country?

#12

Lots of great things being shared here. We never know if OP is actually Russian and aiming to do the opposite of claimed -- nevertheless let's share what we'd normally share anyways. Adding on to what others have said I would say start with this. To be a useful "hacker" to *defend* your country start with ensuring you are not immediately exploitable yourself & then repeat for others close to you. A incomplete shortli…

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Re: Ask HN: What do I need to learn to be useful as a hacker to defend my country?

#13

The time to start a campaign against Russia on behalf of Ukraine was weeks ago. It’s too late now, like calling up the national guard hours before a massive shock and awe blitzkrieg campaign. Zelensky should have been making these appeals a long time ago but was delusional.

Was Zelensky delusional 10 months ago when he requested NATO speed up Ukraine's membership plan?

https://youtu.be/admHGiHGnYY

NATO has decided it was fine with letting Russia have Ukraine with the expectation that Russia would not invade other countries. I swear I've heard this before in a history class.

Re: Ask HN: What do I need to learn to be useful as a hacker to defend my country?

#14
The place I would start is not with offensive skills, but on the defensive side. Learn how to:

- Know when you might be introducing software vulnerabilities

- Find and repair bugs that might turn into vulnerabilities (things like static analysis and fuzzing, but also identifying code smells and where to inspect)

- Identify and avoid phishing attempts

- Identify (and, ideally, mitigate) places where resource exhaustion attacks are likely to be most effective

- Identify (and, ideally, mitigate) places where a process is dependent on external infrastructure that is controlled by another party

- Teach others how to do these things

These things are of high value in the day to day life of a software developer anyway, and there are lots of reputable resources available to learn and practice. In the future, if it turns out that you need offensive skills, that will work out OK too -- there's quite a bit of overlap, though not 100% overlap.

Re: Ask HN: What do I need to learn to be useful as a hacker to defend my country?

#15
Cyber defense is generally a joke. The people who know how to do it knew how before they ever joined the military. The bar is so low for security for pretty much everything that simply showing up to run a Nessus scan and patching basic firewall rules is considered advanced in most quarters. I don't see any path towards helping that isn't a giant waste of time.

Re: Ask HN: What do I need to learn to be useful as a hacker to defend my country?

#16
Find a system or a piece of software, use it a lot (look at source code if you have it) and then ask yourself how you can break it. That's the key to becoming a great hacker.

If you don't understand a piece of software (and I mean really understand it) you probably can't break it in a meaningful way. You may accidentally break it, but your lack of understanding how it actually works will prevent you from further exploiting it.

Just my 2 cents. Hope it helps.

Re: Ask HN: What do I need to learn to be useful as a hacker to defend my country?

#19

You should connect with your country's leadership to put the pressure where it belongs here. You are a citizen showing interest in supporting your nation. So they need to be able to offer you training starting from the basic frameworks, usually the "why" and "what" and later down to the "how" and "when". As part of that training, they should be showing you which skills they want, how they can be acquired, and so on.…

I mean his countries leadership is a little busy at the moment...

Re: Ask HN: What do I need to learn to be useful as a hacker to defend my country?

#20
A lot of people are mentioning software security vulnerability scanning, patching bugs quickly, etc - all extremely important but these measures are better executed continuously and hard to do quickly.

The quickest way to block cyberattacks with measurable security benefit is probably through network controls. ACLs, segmentation, firewalls, IDS/IPS, etc. You can deploy these and block a lot of attacks right off the bat. Looking into AD security, GPO, anything that can deploy configuration to your entire environment is common to exploit and important to lock down. Those are the kinds of measures that have really measurable impact and help prevent the kind of catastrophe that state-sanctioned operations create.

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