How to Hack Like a Legend Cover

How to Hack Like a Legend

Breaking Windows
by Sparc Flow
September 2022, 216 pp.
ISBN-13: 
9781718501508

Look Inside!

How to Hack Like a Legend pp 4-5How to Hack Like a Legend pp 26-27How to Hack Like a Legend Back Cover

Download Chapter 2: BURIED ALIVE

Step into the shoes of a master hacker and break into an intelligent, highly defensive Windows environment. You’ll be infiltrating the suspicious (fictional) offshoring company G & S Trust and their hostile Microsoft stronghold. While the target is fictional, the corporation’s vulnerabilities are based on real life weaknesses in today’s advanced Windows defense systems. You’ll experience all the thrills, frustrations, dead-ends, and eureka moments of the mission first-hand, while picking up practical, cutting-edge techniques for evading Microsoft’s best security systems. 

The adventure starts with setting up your elite hacking infrastructure complete with virtual Windows system. After some thorough passive recon, you’ll craft a sophisticated phishing campaign to steal credentials and gain initial access. Once inside you’ll identify the security systems, scrape passwords, plant persistent backdoors, and delve deep into areas you don’t belong. Throughout your task you’ll get caught, change tack on a tee, dance around defensive monitoring systems, and disable tools from the inside. Sparc Flow’s clever insights, witty reasoning, and stealth maneuvers teach you to be patient, persevere, and adapt your skills at the drop of a hat. 
You’ll learn how to: 

  • Identify and evade Microsoft security systems like Advanced Threat Analysis, QRadar, MDE, and AMSI 
  • Seek out subdomains and open ports with Censys, Python scripts, and other OSINT tools
  • Scrape password hashes using Kerberoasting 
  • Plant camouflaged C# backdoors and payloads
  • Grab victims’ credentials with more advanced techniques like reflection and domain replication

Like other titles in the How to Hack series, this book is packed with interesting tricks, ingenious tips, and links to useful resources to give you a fast-paced, hands-on guide to penetrating and bypassing Microsoft security systems. 

Author Bio 

Sparc Flow is a computer security expert specialized in ethical hacking, who has presented research at international security conferences like Black Hat, DEF CON, and Hack In The Box. While his day job consists of performing penetration tests against companies so they can patch security vulnerabilities, his passion is writing and sharing hacking knowledge through his acclaimed Hack the Planet books.

Table of contents 

Front Matter
Part 1 Starting Blocks
1. Bending but Never Breaking
2. Buried Alive
3. Scream, Aim, Fire!
4. Perfecting the Hook
Part 2 First Dive in
5. Prison Break
6. Busting in and Getting Busted
7. Know Thy Enemy
Part 3 Back to the Arena
8. Through Logs and Fire
9. Russian Roulette
10. Finally Free
11. Defeating the Machines
12. Perfecting the Backdoor
Part 4 Salvation
13. Hunting for Data
14. Jackpot

Reviews 

"How To Hack Like a Legend is a well written, story lead, day in a life of a hacker taking you into his hacking mindset and showing the reader even failure can be turned into a successful hack. This sort of hands-on material is normally only ever gained through experiences in real life. Above all, being able to get all this information down on paper and wrapping it all up with a fictional story really shows Sparc knows what he’s talking about."
—Security Tutorials

"Another great hacker plot by Spark Flow. This is the 7th book in his series on penetration testing, and like the rest it does not disappoint . . . Short, engaging, technical, and really fun."
—LockBoxx: A Hacker's Blog

"A good addition to his series. It covers many more topics to the existing others. This book is available to everyone because all tools and techniques presented are open sources."
—OnlineBooksReview

"What sets this book apart from other cyber security books is the unique plot it follows . . . The book is written for penetration testers and red teamers, but if you have some knowledge in IT do not hesitate to pick it up. It is a great read and Sparc Flow details step-by-step every line of code and obscure tip to make it understandable by everyone."
—Tech Guide and Reviews

"A good introduction to the entire process of infiltrating and compromising a network from beginning to end, and the kind of logical and creative thinking needed to successfully compromise a well secured environment."
—Darlene Hibbs, Senior Cybersecurity Researcher, Fortra

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