PWNLOGS

This post about the two-day "Ethical Hacking Workshop" I conducted as a part of Shaastra 2019. Watching the glittering faces of each participant, their proud in each hack was an amazing experience! Here is a short summary of the workshop.

The Workshop

The workshop covered a variety of Web Exploits, Network scanning, and OS exploits. We(myself and my amazing participants) started with the introduction to hacking. I wanted to make sure that all my students wear a white hat. So, we spend time discussing the ethics of hacking. After covering the basics of Ethical Hacking in the morning session, we moved on to web-exploits in the afternoon. The afternoon session and the following 2 sessions were purely hands-on sessions where the participants took down the control of websites and operating systems.

We started off day 2 with more exciting topics on web-exploits. They were astonished to see how they can know everything about a system just by using a simple input box in a web page. As I expected, when I armed the participants with a hacker's mindset, they were able to take down even the harder exploits with ease. The second session of day 2, was focused on "Network Scanning and Exploits". Participants were quick to get hold of Nmap and Metasploit. When I focused on the approach more than the tool, they were ready to take down systems by themselves.

Finally, the participants competed among themselves to take down the system that was projected on the big screen. And the first team was quite quick to take it down as well. The excitement of participants on hacking into the live system was incredible. Needless to say, every team participated in this final contest with so much enthusiasm.

The kind of response that I was getting from the participants inspired me to even go overtime. The enthusiastic group of young minds had questions on many more technologies. And I was the happiest to talk about all of them.

Thanks to all the participants for such a wonderful experience.