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

If you want to learn offensive security skills, particularly binary analysis, I highly recommend https://pwn.college

It's a hands-on class that takes you through interacting with programs, to reverse engineering and memory corruption, all the way to race conditions and kernel exploitation.

Created by @Zardus and run also as a class at ASU.

In the short term, low intensity large scale "offensive" action is probably the course to take with most potential return. Just poke with as many Russian server/service as possible. Since your country has a high risk of being (unfortunately) under Russian control soon, take some minimal precautions to cover your traces.

This is basically the same principle as international sanctions. Try to make everything harder for Russia and (unfortunately) for Russian people. Playing people's opinion against their leader. You can do the same in Belarus that saw civil unrest recently, mobilizing Russian soldiers.

The way I've learnt this shit was very unstructured, extensively unoptimized and even still, I'm far from being anywhere near the l33ts. However, over the past 2 years, I can say for sure I became pretty proficient in identifying vulnerabilities in (web) applications for the most part. The article that brought back my interested in hacking was this: https://gist.github.com/jaredsburrows/9e121d2e5f1147ab12a696... after reading this: https://crimethinc.com/2018/06/05/hackback-talking-with-phin....

There was a bunch of things I didn't understand when I first read it, so I took notes of mostly everything and started slowly by isolating topics, trying connect the dots as I was learning something new. Every once in awhile, I would go back to see if there were still things I didn't get it / or had missed, and there was always something. Eventually, the whole thing became a little more straightforward.

From there, it was just a matter of sharping my knowledge regarding more specific types of vulnerabilities and basically try them out into the wild. Worth mentioning, I have a background as a developer and although I had always been interested in cyber security, some concepts just escaped me. My programming skills however, made it easier to understand how to attack / defend applications. But this is just a small part of it.

Hacking is broader than that though, so it's not something that happens overnight. There are things I still have no idea how it works, but at least i know where to look. Also, not knowing a few things here and there doesn't make me necessarily worse than others h4ck3rs, as stupidity plays a huge whole in the cyber security realm as well and quite often, things are easier than you would expect (looking from the attacking standing point). Sitting on the defending side is quite hard though, as you have to covered everything as much as you can, while being an attacker, you just have to get lucky once.

hope this gives you some sort of direction.