How to Hack Like a Ghost

Book excerpt: How to Hack Like a Ghost takes you deep inside the mind of a hacker as you carry out a fictionalized attack against a tech company, teaching cutting-edge hacking techniques along the way. Go deep into the mind of a master hacker as he breaks into a hostile, cloud-based security environment. Sparc Flow invites you to shadow him every step of the way, from recon to infiltration, as you hack a shady, data-driven political consulting firm. While the target is fictional, the corporation’s vulnerabilities are based on real-life weaknesses in today’s advanced cybersecurity defense systems. You’ll experience all the thrills, frustrations, dead-ends, and eureka moments of his mission first-hand, while picking up practical, cutting-edge techniques for penetrating cloud technologies. There are no do-overs for hackers, so your training starts with basic OpSec procedures, using an ephemeral OS, Tor, bouncing servers, and detailed code to build an anonymous, replaceable hacking infrastructure guaranteed to avoid detection. From there, you’ll examine some effective recon techniques, develop tools from scratch, and deconstruct low-level features in common systems to gain access to the target. Spark Flow’s clever insights, witty reasoning, and stealth maneuvers teach you how to think on your toes and adapt his skills to your own hacking tasks. You'll learn: How to set up and use an array of disposable machines that can renew in a matter of seconds to change your internet footprint How to do effective recon, like harvesting hidden domains and taking advantage of DevOps automation systems to trawl for credentials How to look inside and gain access to AWS’s storage systems How cloud security systems like Kubernetes work, and how to hack them Dynamic techniques for escalating privileges Packed with interesting tricks, ingenious tips, and links to external resources, this fast-paced, hands-on guide to penetrating modern cloud systems will help hackers of all stripes succeed on their next adventure.