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

#21
post #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 exhaustio…

All of 0 of these skills will help the current situation as this developer probably does not control any of the critical software himself. This sounds like a great list if you're CTO currently building software for critical infrastructure and have the power to enforce trainings across the org.

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

#22
post #7

Here’s the UK’s cyber reservist list of desirable skills: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/joint-forces-com...

Are any of those listed qualifications valuable? I already know that Prince2 isn’t going to be the bulwark against an invasion.

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

#24
post #7

Here’s the UK’s cyber reservist list of desirable skills: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/joint-forces-com...

Are any of those listed qualifications valuable? I already know that Prince2 isn’t going to be the bulwark against an invasion.

I see many security certifications in that list that are useful (e.g. OSCP). You focused on the least useful of those.

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

#25
At the end of the day firearm training is probably more valuable than anything else in Ukraine right now. Taking pot shots from a distance at groups of troops can cause them to seek cover and slow down their progression. I think that's about the best you can do as 1 - 4 people. Look to the Vietnamese or Taliban on how to defeat a larger better equiped force with a smaller less equiped one.

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

#26
The world is not an RPG video game, you likely can't just strictly "improve" yourself up to any given standard (no matter what any employer or teacher tells you - they're just trying to buy time as you sit in their classroom or accept a lower paycheck than you are worth). Experience is key, and it ISN'T best measured in years - you can likely put in more time than anybody on something given that you seem like a young kid who's eager.

That being said, and now that it's clear that you aren't just going to push a number higher until you can send all of your cyber zerglings into the enemy's virtual mineral line, this is a good process to follow for finding serious vulnerabilities - exploiting them should be trivial if you have a good enough understanding of the system:

- Think of a system in use, at any layer of the stack. This could be a specific web application in use by the enemy, a runtime that's used by some applications of theirs, or a memory/cache model on a CPU architecture that's flawed or anything like that

- Learn enough about that system that you can understand any inner working of it

- Painstakingly look through areas where you, just via inference, can tell that there could be some sort of vulnerability - key areas to focus on are something that is something downstream to user input, or something similar.

All of that is to say that, if you aren't already "useful", your country is probably going to have a regime change before you can find anything strictly useful.

If there's something simple enough that someone who's relatively unexperienced can do it, then it's probably automated.

OR - use a bunch of stolen credit cards you bought online for $3 each to rent a few VPS' (maybe come up with some consolidation solution to more easily make accounts and setup SSH boxes) and throw as much layer 4 traffic at Russian endpoints as you can :-).

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

#28

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.

Yes, 10 months ago and the time surrounding it, Ukrainian membership has never been viable politically or militarily so Zelensky should have seen the writing on the wall. What is sad is that NATO would allow war to happen in order to maintain the hypothetical capacity to admit a country that may no longer exist. If NATO appeasement wouldn't have contained Putin it would be nice to at least have him on record saying he is invading for other reasons.

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

#30
I strongly believe that one needs several years to achieve the skill level to become useful in that field. Unless you are looking for a job for life, starting now is a few years too late. Other comments provided info on how to start.

I also think that tanks, fighter planes and helicopters are pretty hard to defend via hacking; it's like defending a password against a 5$ wrench used to hit you repeatedly.

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