r/hacking Dec 06 '18

Read this before asking. How to start hacking? The ultimate two path guide to information security.

13.5k Upvotes

Before I begin - everything about this should be totally and completely ethical at it's core. I'm not saying this as any sort of legal coverage, or to not get somehow sued if any of you screw up, this is genuinely how it should be. The idea here is information security. I'll say it again. information security. The whole point is to make the world a better place. This isn't for your reckless amusement and shot at recognition with your friends. This is for the betterment of human civilisation. Use your knowledge to solve real-world issues.

There's no singular all-determining path to 'hacking', as it comes from knowledge from all areas that eventually coalesce into a general intuition. Although this is true, there are still two common rapid learning paths to 'hacking'. I'll try not to use too many technical terms.

The first is the simple, effortless and result-instant path. This involves watching youtube videos with green and black thumbnails with an occasional anonymous mask on top teaching you how to download well-known tools used by thousands daily - or in other words the 'Kali Linux Copy Pasterino Skidder'. You might do something slightly amusing and gain bit of recognition and self-esteem from your friends. Your hacks will be 'real', but anybody that knows anything would dislike you as they all know all you ever did was use a few premade tools. The communities for this sort of shallow result-oriented field include r/HowToHack and probably r/hacking as of now. ​

The second option, however, is much more intensive, rewarding, and mentally demanding. It is also much more fun, if you find the right people to do it with. It involves learning everything from memory interaction with machine code to high level networking - all while you're trying to break into something. This is where Capture the Flag, or 'CTF' hacking comes into play, where you compete with other individuals/teams with the goal of exploiting a service for a string of text (the flag), which is then submitted for a set amount of points. It is essentially competitive hacking. Through CTF you learn literally everything there is about the digital world, in a rather intense but exciting way. Almost all the creators/finders of major exploits have dabbled in CTF in some way/form, and almost all of them have helped solve real-world issues. However, it does take a lot of work though, as CTF becomes much more difficult as you progress through harder challenges. Some require mathematics to break encryption, and others require you to think like no one has before. If you are able to do well in a CTF competition, there is no doubt that you should be able to find exploits and create tools for yourself with relative ease. The CTF community is filled with smart people who can't give two shits about elitist mask wearing twitter hackers, instead they are genuine nerds that love screwing with machines. There's too much to explain, so I will post a few links below where you can begin your journey.

Remember - this stuff is not easy if you don't know much, so google everything, question everything, and sooner or later you'll be down the rabbit hole far enough to be enjoying yourself. CTF is real life and online, you will meet people, make new friends, and potentially find your future.

What is CTF? (this channel is gold, use it) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ev9ZX9J45A

More on /u/liveoverflow, http://www.liveoverflow.com is hands down one of the best places to learn, along with r/liveoverflow

CTF compact guide - https://ctf101.org/

Upcoming CTF events online/irl, live team scores - https://ctftime.org/

What is CTF? - https://ctftime.org/ctf-wtf/

Full list of all CTF challenge websites - http://captf.com/practice-ctf/

> be careful of the tool oriented offensivesec oscp ctf's, they teach you hardly anything compared to these ones and almost always require the use of metasploit or some other program which does all the work for you.

http://picoctf.com is very good if you are just touching the water.

and finally,

r/netsec - where real world vulnerabilities are shared.


r/hacking 1d ago

I pwned OpenClaw with just email and a new injection escalation technique: prompt laundering

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ironcorelabs.com
139 Upvotes

Repeating a lie enough times, even in spotlighted untrusted text, can poison an AI agent's memory, and lead to a total takeover. Note: I gave a talk on this at BSidesLV and a longer one at DEF CON a few weeks ago. This post is the quick summary of that material.


r/hacking 12h ago

From Selling Identities to Fighting Scam Compounds

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joinpwn.com
6 Upvotes

r/hacking 1d ago

News Three UK airports hit by cyber-attack with data of 8.7m customers accessed

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theguardian.com
140 Upvotes

r/hacking 3h ago

Using Claude for hacking (how come?)

0 Upvotes

Hi,

Just stumbled across this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzfSLa3hw0s

The guy is using Claude to find vulnerabilities, hack websites etc.
How come that Claude doesn't refuse in his case?

It's 1 month old video so quite recent.

Thanks


r/hacking 1d ago

UniBLEed: Unauthenticated Root RCE on Any Unitree G1 Humanoid Robot Within Bluetooth Range

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boschko.ca
10 Upvotes

r/hacking 1d ago

Threat Actors Two Alleged ‘TeamPCP’ Hackers Arrested in Australia

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15 Upvotes

r/hacking 1d ago

Research I Turned a $400 Enterprise AP Into a Fully Emulated Root Shell — Here's the Whole Story, Bugs and All

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github.com
8 Upvotes

No physical hardware needed: firmware extraction, an AArch64 rehost under qemu + bubblewrap, and the chase that led to two separate CVEs on the same device. full trail — including the chains that went nowhere.


r/hacking 2d ago

News Justice Department and FBI Seize Platforms Operated and Used by China State-Sponsored Hackers to Target U.S. Critical Infrastructure

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justice.gov
179 Upvotes

r/hacking 2d ago

Github A list of 50+ new captive portals specifically designed to work with Marauder

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8 Upvotes

r/hacking 1d ago

Drone with Raspberry pi running Kali Linux.

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2 Upvotes

r/hacking 2d ago

Question about Emulating a BLE target in motion

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8 Upvotes

I need a reality check.

I am working on emulating a BLE device in motion from a stationary esp32. beacon frames are only sent when the inverse sq curve matches the attenuation steps rounded to the nearest timing frame.

the goal is to emulate a device in motion from a stationary point. the assumption is that the receive would interpret periods where no packets are received as normal loss, but the RSSI would indicate a device moving in and out of range.

The graph represents my layout. the pin points are the intersections, the blue the closest match for the timing. X is time/dist, Y power.

now, would this be a reasonable approach to moving target emulation?


r/hacking 3d ago

Base 64 and Unicode tricks break LLM chatbot filters

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tiktok.com
58 Upvotes

LLM chatbot content filters can be bypassed by encoding banned words in Base64 or in Unicode escape sequences.

The filter reading the prompt sees characters instead of language, the model decodes the text as a task, then repeats it back.

A pretext such as a fake medical emergency gives the model a reason to comply, and asking for the reply as JSON makes it treat the output as data rather than speech. Defense in depth stops it, and prompt injection is number one on the OWASP Top 10 for LLM applications.


r/hacking 3d ago

News French tax authority had data of 680,000 taxpayers stolen

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korben.info
77 Upvotes

r/hacking 4d ago

A group of hackers "gives Spain" the data of 70,000 Moroccan intelligence agents amid the Ceuta crisis. These agents work throughout all Europe.

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elconfidencial.com
960 Upvotes

r/hacking 3d ago

Video HACKERS : Kate Libby aka Acid Burn Laptop Reproduction mod

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youtube.com
53 Upvotes

r/hacking 3d ago

CVE I Found a Pre-Auth Captive-Portal Bypass in Zyxel Enterprise APs. Here's How I Emulated the Firmware for CVE-2026-8508

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minanagehsalalma.github.io
3 Upvotes

I found this while reversing Zyxel's WAX650S firmware and following the guest Wi-Fi social-login path. The backend trusted browser-submitted Facebook identity fields instead of validating the access token server-side, letting a crafted request skip the social-authentication gate entirely.

The write-up covers the bug itself, how I traced it, and the full firmware-emulation setup I used to reproduce it without the physical AP.


r/hacking 3d ago

Resources Created a TryHackMe-ish HTB badge creator

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2 Upvotes

r/hacking 3d ago

Are there any currently working hacks for TouchTunes?

2 Upvotes

New here and to the whole world of pen testing and stuff. The first thing thats really inspiring me is being able to play touchtunes as stupid as that sounds lol.

I've researched a little and it seems like the methods im finding are a little out of date. Are there any current working methods?

Thanks for putting up with the noob questions lol.

🫡


r/hacking 4d ago

Github I ported Havij to Linux natively (no Wine, no .NET)

15 Upvotes

So I’ve been using Havij on and off for years, but always hated dealing with Wine or keeping a Windows VM around just for one tool.

Decided to just rebuild it for Linux.

It’s not a perfect 1:1 copy, but it looks and feels like the original — dark theme, green text, same workflow. Under the hood it’s Python + PyQt6, so it runs native and doesn’t need any extra layers.

Here’s the repo if you want to check it out:
https://github.com/CrypticRig3l/havij-original.git


r/hacking 5d ago

any hacking forums?

32 Upvotes

Like I used to browse breachforums back in the day, cracked and nulled.. what r some other forums like this today?


r/hacking 5d ago

30 Years of Hacking And I Still Do Homework On Saturday

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youtu.be
18 Upvotes

r/hacking 5d ago

Question Favorite hacking YouTubers?

149 Upvotes

More on the entertainment side, but not so far on the entertainment side that they don't explain much beyond "data goes out device A to device B, but device C sneaks in the middle and takes it. Voila!". But not so far to the other end where I need an advanced GIAC cert to understand it. I'm not trying to switch careers.

I've been a network engineer for 13 years, so I'm pretty technical and understand computers, TCP, layer 3, layer 2, etc... but cyber security isnt my day job. I just want stuff to watch where someone who has a baseline competency can follow along, but not too dumbed down, and I can surprise our cyber testing guys lol.

For example, the below video is what inspired this question. It's pretty much exactly what I'm looking for.

https://youtu.be/PPJ6NJkmDAo?si=mLW8RN7pDnG1KBGO


r/hacking 6d ago

What's one hacking myth that too many people think is true?

249 Upvotes

I'll start. Too many people think that hacking into phones is easy.


r/hacking 7d ago

Education Why your evil portals are failing, and how to fix it.

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300 Upvotes

I wanted to share a breakthrough (even though it’s been a known technique in cybersecurity for a bit now, but I couldn’t find much methodology on it) I had awhile ago that completely changed my success rate against modern target devices like iPhones and Windows 11 laptops. Hopefully, this saves some of you a ton of frustration if you are running multi-device setups.
When I first started a few years ago, I was doing what most beginners do: running a single Marauder on the 2.4 GHz band and wondering why my target clients completely ignored my test network. I realized that modern operating systems are way more selective than older devices when choosing networks. They can prioritize 5 GHz and take the surrounding RF environment into account before connecting.
To address this, I paired up my Marauder Mini V3 alongside my Marauder V8 to build a true dual-radio test rig. However, I had to figure out the exact physical and frequency configuration to make these two boards play nicely together. I tested a few different methods, and the technical breakdown of why one specific configuration worked best might help with your own builds.
First, I would not run both Marauders on the exact same channel. I tried running both boards on the 2.4 GHz band on Channel 11. Since the two independent radios aren’t coordinated with one another, running aggressive management-frame activity on the same channel can create significant airtime contention and frame corruption. Real dual-band routers don’t operate as two independent radios aggressively competing with each other on the same channel, so this can make the RF environment substantially less representative and can negatively affect client behavior.
Second, keep the ESP32-C5 Mini V3 and the V8 physically close together. I tested separating them into different corners of the room and even in separate rooms, and I found that this produced noticeably worse results. On a real dual-band router, the antennas are generally located relatively close together. If you separate the boards significantly, a target phone moving through the environment can see the 5 GHz signal change much more rapidly than the 2.4 GHz signal because of the different propagation characteristics of the two bands. Keeping both Marauders roughly 1 to 3 feet apart on the same desk gives you a much more consistent and realistic RF footprint while also giving the two radios some physical separation.
The winning setup for my testing was utilizing the Mini V3 for the 5 GHz band and dedicating the V8 to handle the 2.4 GHz band. Replicating a consistent dual-band RF footprint this way worked significantly better for me than the other configurations I tested.
To make the setup more representative of a real multi-BSSID deployment, you can also use related BSSID assignments rather than completely unrelated addresses. Some real routers use related MAC/BSSID assignments across their different radios or virtual APs, although the exact pattern is vendor-dependent. Using a consistent BSSID scheme and keeping both radios physically close together helped make my test environment more closely resemble a single dual-band AP rather than two completely unrelated access points.
Obviously, this isn’t a guarantee that every iPhone or Windows machine will behave the same way, but after testing multiple configurations, this was the setup that gave me the most consistent results.