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Step 1: Identify your target

While Anonymous and other online hacktivists may choose their targets in order to protest against perceived wrong-doing, for a beginner wanting to get the taste of success with their first hack, the best thing to do is to identify a any website which has a vulnerability.

Recently a hacker posted a list of 5,000 websites online which were vulnerable to attack. How did he/she identify these websites? Well, the key to creating a list of websites which are likely to be more open to attack, is to carry out a search for what is called a Google Dork.

Google Dorking, also known as Google Hacking, enables you find sensitive data or evidence of vulnerabilities by querying a search engine like Google or Bing. It basically allows you to enter a search term into Google and find websites which may have these vulnerabilities somewhere on the site.

Don't worry about needing technical expertise to know what to look for. Kind-hearted hackers have produced lists of these Google Dorks, neatly categorised into the type of vulnerability you are looking for. Looking for files containing passwords? There's got a Dork for that. Login credentials? There's a Dork for that.

For example, if you are looking for files stored on websites containing passwords, then a sample search query we found openly listed on one indexing site was: intitle:"Index of" master.passwd. This returns the results shown in the screengrab above.

So now you have a list of potential victims. Next you need to narrow this down even further.

Step 2: Check for vulnerabilities

Having a huge number of sites which may or may not be vulnerable is not much use unless you can pinpoint one which is actually open to attack. This is when a programme called a vulnerability scanner comes into its own and the most popular is called Acunetix.

Acunetix, developed by a UK-based company, was designed, and is still used, as a tool for web developers to test sites they are building. However the hacking community has commandeered the tool and uses it to identify existing vulnerable sites.

You can download a trial version of the software for free from the official Acunetix website or if you venture into the murky depths of a hacker forum and search for Acunetix, you can find cracked versions of the full application freely available.

How to Hack a Website

Acunetix, as you can see from the screen shots above, is a simple, straight-forward Windows application and all you need to do is enter the URL of the site you want to target, and press Process. Acunetix will scan the entire website, including all pages associated with it, and return a list of vulnerabilities it finds.

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