Now as I promised you, this course is going to be highly practical,
but I also promised that I will not neglect the theory.
Now what we mean by hacking, is being able to gain access to a system
that you're not supposed to have access to.
So for example, login into an email account that you're not supposed to have access to,
is considered hacking that account.
Gaining access to a remote computer that you're not supposed to have access to,
is hacking that computer.
Reading information that you're not supposed to be able to read, again is considered hacking.
So you can see that there is a large number of ways to hack into a system
and the word hacking can refer to a number of things but the main concept is the same.
Gaining access or being able to do things that you're not supposed to be able to do, is considered hacking.
Now there are three main types of hackers.
We have the 'black hat hackers'.
These are the bad people that hack systems illegally in order to steal money
or to achieve their own illegal goals.
The second part of hackers are the 'white hat hackers'.
So this is us.
These people use the same techniques used by the black hat hackers and they also hack into systems,
but the only hack into systems that they have permission to hack,
in order to test the security of these systems.
And finally, we have the 'gray hat hackers'.
These are a mixture of the two.
So they'll hack into any system, even if they don't have permission to test the security of this system.
But they will never steal money or damage that system and in most cases
they'll go ahead and tell the administrator of that system.
But what they do is still illegal because they test the security of systems that they do not own
or do not have permission to test.
Now one big question that people always ask is, why hacking? Why teach or learn hacking?
Well hacking is an existing industry.
There are lots of job opportunities for ethical hackers,
for people like us, who would go ahead and test the security of systems
to make sure that these systems are secure and not vulnerable to black hat hackers.
There is actually a huge demand for ethical hackers these days
because of the increased amount of hacking attacks.
So we hear on the daily basis that big systems and big companies are getting hacked.
Not so long ago uber got hacked and information of more than 56 million users were exposed.
So companies like uber, Facebook and Google,
they hire hackers in order to try and hack into their systems
and tell them where the weaknesses are, so that they can fix it.
They also have bug bounty programs, where they literally ask all the hackers around the world,
to go ahead and try to hack into their websites and with their web applications
and if they could they will pay them a bounty for the bugs that they find.