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…
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?
#22Here’s the UK’s cyber reservist list of desirable skills: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/joint-forces-com...
Re: Ask HN: What do I need to learn to be useful as a hacker to defend my country?
#23Re: Ask HN: What do I need to learn to be useful as a hacker to defend my country?
#24Here’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?
#25Re: Ask HN: What do I need to learn to be useful as a hacker to defend my country?
#26That 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 $3 each to rent a few VPS' (maybe come up with some consolidation solution to more easily make accounts and setup SSH boxes) and throw as much layer 4 traffic at Russian endpoints as you can :-).
Re: Ask HN: What do I need to learn to be useful as a hacker to defend my country?
#27Re: Ask HN: What do I need to learn to be useful as a hacker to defend my country?
#28The time to start a campaign against Russia on behalf of Ukraine was weeks ago. It’s too late now, like calling up the national guard hours before a massive shock and awe blitzkrieg campaign. Zelensky should have been making these appeals a long time ago but was delusional.
Was Zelensky delusional 10 months ago when he requested NATO speed up Ukraine's membership plan? https://youtu.be/admHGiHGnYY NATO has decided it was fine with letting Russia have Ukraine with the expectation that Russia would not invade other countries. I swear I've heard this before in a history class.
Re: Ask HN: What do I need to learn to be useful as a hacker to defend my country?
#29Re: Ask HN: What do I need to learn to be useful as a hacker to defend my country?
#30I also think that tanks, fighter planes and helicopters are pretty hard to defend via hacking; it's like defending a password against a 5$ wrench used to hit you repeatedly.