OK, just to make sure: With
ethical hacker you mean someone who tests the security of systems to help rather than to steal data, correct?
I myself am no expert in that field and also discussing this kind of topic is rather difficult as while you may have only the best intentions, the skills needed to be an ethical hacker can also be misused for evil (which would then go against our
posting guidelines). But here's some general advice:
- Read the jargon file. While not absolutely essential, it helps understanding the hacker culture. Some of my personal recommendations are Cracker, The Story of Mel and A Portrait of J. Random Hacker: Personality Characteristics.
- Many security risks are connected to networks, so learn about network protocols such als ip, tcp, udp, http, ftp, smtp,... You can find a lot of information on those via the w3c sites.
- Learn how to use UNIX/Linux as a lot of services somehow rely on these systems. I wrote a beginners article to Linux years ago, that should be a good starting point. Once you've chosen a distribution look for tutorials and articles, try creating your own problems and solving them and please, please, please: Read man pages!
- Then continue with learning about shell programming (bash is widely used, but it's not the only one) and scripting (perl and python are both very popular and widespread). Both concepts are very important for having a deep understanding of both how the systems you will be working with function and how to manipulate them. Also, Assembler is probably a good idea.
- Encryption is a big issue in hacking, so learn about that too. There are many different encryption methods and I must admit that I don't know much about them, but I'm sure Wikipedia can give you a good general overview and there are other resources for the more in-depth stuff.
OK, that's all I can think of off the top of my head. There are many books that may help you in becoming an ethical hacker, though which exactly would be the best for you depend on what you want to focus on. (Also, I'm no expert in that area so I'm in no position to recommend any specific books.)
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