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Hacking For Dummies
Author:
Published:
September 29, 2025
Overview
Think like a hacker to protect your sensitive information
To safeguard your private data from prying eyes, it helps to understand how hackers do what they do. Hacking For Dummies gives you the tools you need to step into a hacker's shoes and discover the best strategies to secure your data. You won't learn how to steal your neighbors' Wi-Fi, but you will gain the skills to keep nosy hackers out of your systems and applications. With clear, jargon-free explanations, you'll learn to recognize cyberthreats and keep your information safe. This updated edition includes new content on AI, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the security implications of hybrid work.
- Understand the tools hackers use to steal sensitive data from individuals and businesses
- Discover methods of protecting your information—including improving your security, recognizing phishing scams, and more
- Assess your current network and cloud configurations from a hacker's perspective using proven vulnerability and penetration testing techniques
- Defend against AI-generated scams, lost devices, and other common threats
Hacking For Dummies is for anyone looking to protect their devices from hacking—at home, at the office, or anywhere in-between.
Not all hacking is bad. It reveals security weaknesses or flaws in your computing setups. This Cheat Sheet provides you with quick references to tools and tips and alerts you to commonly hacked targets — information you need to make your security testing efforts easier.Hacking tools you can’t live withoutAs an IT information security professional, your toolkit is the most critical item you can possess against hacking — other than hands-on experience and common sense.
About The Author
Kevin Beaver is an information security consultant, writer, and professional speaker with nearly four decades of experience in information technology. He’s the founder of Principle Logic, LLC, an independent information security company that focuses on vulnerability and penetration testing, security operations reviews, and virtual CISO consulting services.
Articles From The Book
3 results
Cybersecurity
Articles
Hackers use a variety of means to gain passwords. One of the most common ways for hackers to get access to your passwords is through social engineering, but they don’t stop there. Check out the following tools and vulnerabilities hackers exploit to grab your password.
Keystroke logging
One of the best techniques for capturing passwords is remote keystroke logging — the use of software or hardware to record keystrokes as they’re typed.
Cybersecurity
Articles
Although it’s not usually top of mind, people send a ton of good info via email that a hacker can use. Knowing this, you will want to ensure that your email systems are probably warded against hackers. The following countermeasures help keep messages as secure as possible to avoid an email hack.
Software solutions that combat email hacking
The right software can neutralize many threats against your email system:
Use antimalware software on the email server — better, the email gateway — to prevent malware from reaching email clients.
Cybersecurity
Articles
Database systems — such as Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle — have lurked behind the scenes, but their value, security vulnerabilities and ability to be hacked have finally come to the forefront. Yes, even the mighty Oracle, which was once claimed to be unhackable, is as susceptible to exploits and hacks as its competition.
Cybersecurity
Articles
Not all hacking is bad. It reveals security weaknesses or flaws in your computing setups. This Cheat Sheet provides you with quick references to tools and tips and alerts you to commonly hacked targets — information you need to make your security testing efforts easier.Hacking tools you can’t live withoutAs an IT information security professional, your toolkit is the most critical item you can possess against hacking — other than hands-on experience and common sense.
Cybersecurity
Articles
As part of mapping out your network before performing security testing or an ethical hack, you can search public databases and resources to see what other people know about your systems.
WHOIS lookups
The best starting point is to perform a WHOIS lookup by using any one of the tools available on the internet. In case you're not familiar, WHOIS is a protocol you can use to query online databases such as DNS registries to learn more about domain names and IP address blocks.
Cybersecurity
Articles
Hackers often use information that is public to target organizations. The amount of public information you can gather about an organization’s business and information systems from the internet is staggering. To see for yourself how hackers utilize public information to launch an attack, use the techniques outlined below to gather information about your own organization.
Cybersecurity
Articles
One way to begin planning an ethical hack on your business is through a process often called footprinting. Through footprinting, you see what others can see about your organization and systems. Here is the process for footprinting:
Gather public information
The amount of information you can gather about an organization’s business and information systems is staggering and widely available on the internet.
Cybersecurity
Articles
As with practically any IT or security project, you need to plan security testing. And, since it's been said that action without planning is the root of every failure, strategic and tactical issues in vulnerability and penetration testing need to be determined and agreed on in advance.To ensure the success of your ethical hacking efforts, spend time planning for any amount of testing, from a simple OS password-cracking test against a few servers to a penetration test of a complex web environment.
Cybersecurity
Articles
Many organizations have enemies who want to cause trouble through social engineering. These people may be current or former employees seeking revenge, competitors wanting a leg up, or hackers trying to prove their worth. In any event, the information gained from social engineering can be useful to someone hoping to launch a hacker attack against your organization.
Cybersecurity
Articles
Websites and applications are notorious for taking practically any type of input, mistakenly assuming that it’s valid, and processing it further. Not validating input is one of the greatest mistakes that web developers can make and one of the finest tools in a hackers toolkit.Several attacks that insert malformed data — often, too much at one time — can be run against a website or application, which can confuse the system and make it divulge too much information to the hacker.
Cybersecurity
Articles
Every system you have in place can be subject to hacking. This includes email hacking, such as email bombs. Email bombs attack by creating denial of service (DoS) conditions against your email software and even your network and Internet connections by taking up a large amount of bandwidth and sometimes requiring large amounts of storage space.
