Preface
This course teaches you how hackers and developers break and secure software. They do so using a myriad of tools, many of which you will be exposed to in this course. This lab brings you up-to-speed on the course preliminaries required to understand and use such tools.
Upon completing this lab, you will have a rudimentary understanding of how hackers and developers use computers; you will be familiar with the command line, shell scripting, and how computers communicate ("computer ecosystem literacy", if you will).
The first few lectures, in addition, have a few more preliminaries on computer systems and the Web, which builds on the material presented here.
Preparation
Your machine:
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Shell, skip exercise 10
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Scripting & Tools, skip exercise 2+
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Command-Line Environment, skip "Terminal Multiplexers" & "Aliases", skip exercises.
Other machines:
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How does the Internet work? (7 pages)
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netcat: creating Bind- and Reverse-Shells (URL broken; here it is)
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Video demo (11:17)
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Acknowledgment
This lab is a sampling of The Missing Semester of Your CS Education, a class at MIT on computer ecosystem literacy and tool usage, by Anish Athalye, Jose Javier, and Jon Gjengset. Big shoutout to them for preparing this material.