Ask HN: Fun lures to teach a little brother to hack? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Fun lures to teach a little brother to hack?

5 pointsjobeirne6 comments

I have a brother who has struggled with behaving at school since kindergarten; he is now 15 and, because of recent and increased upheaval on his part (I can't say I blame him) is now being home schooled. He's a very intelligent kid who loves computers and I'd like to take an active role in his education.

I'm currently a university student studying computer science, so I figured I'd put together a "Hack101" curriculum which we could work though during the course of the year as an elective alongside his core subjects; the class would serve to lure him into computing via subjects more appealing to his demographic, i.e. mischievous, (somewhat) deprecated tricks that would be exciting for a youngish guy.

Thus far I have a couple of topics in mind, two being buffer overflow and mail spoofing; of course, these two take some working up to---that's how I plan to sneak in some legitimately useful material like x86 familiarity, stack architecture, and maybe some TCP/IP stuff.

I'm seeking other fun, relatively innocuous topics we could cover and possibly some resources on them. Any suggestions? Thanks very much!

Did I read it right? Do you really want to raise another script kiddie? There are tons of ways to teach him ethical hacking, games are the easiest and the most fun. Show him how to mod a shooter, or download something like Game Maker and show him how to create a simple platform game. Don't teach him the kind of silly trick that can put him in more trouble.

By the way, why you are assuming that, because he likes computers, he will like hacking? Most male teenagers like cars, but very few of them are interested in fixing or modding them. Help him find his own vocation, and support him. He doesn't seem to be the kind of kid you can "shape", anyway.

Hey whoa pal, I didn't say I was going to hand him a copy of L0phtCrack and tell him to get to it (note my use of the word 'innocuous'):

First of all, I said that we would be talking about deprecated tricks, just silly things where the exploit environment would have to be set up such that one could use these tricks.

Secondly, more of the citizenry should be aware exactly of how the most common exploits work as to prevent future pieces of software from suffering the same poor design.

Thirdly, I chose security topics because I myself am interested in them; I wanted to choose a topic that I'd be interested in as well because that way I have the tenacity to actually develop lesson plans, lectures and homework throughout the year.

"First of all, I said that we would be talking about deprecated tricks, just silly things where the exploit environment would have to be set up such that one could use these tricks."

Even the crusty old stack-based buffer overflow can still be exploitable if the people who wrote the code in question didn't use any mitigations. It's plugging my own work, but the Green Dam censorware vulnerabilities from June (http://www.cse.umich.edu/~jhalderm/pub/gd) were stack-based overflows, and I got a remote shell in the lab through Firefox on Windows XP. Apparently, DEP was not properly activated in that build of Firefox. It's even worse with unpatched XP, which, IIRC, has no DEP at all.

You may be able to bait him into learning how to program by showing him what the effect of a successful exploit is (i.e., remote shell). However, I think it takes too long to learn how to program alone to attempt to teach someone to program for the first time and teach security at the same time. Nonetheless, the reading list for my advisor's graduate-level security course is on its website at http://www.eecs.umich.edu/courses/eecs588/, and there's a new undergraduate security course being taught this semester at http://www.eecs.umich.edu/courses/eecs398/ . Porting Aleph One's Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit to AMD64 is a useful exercise.

DSPython is a Python port to the Nintendo DS. If he's into that, you might be able to get him to learn to program with the goal of making DS games. I tried this with my younger cousin, but he's too young (under 10) to have the required attention span. My patches to get DSPython working with newer devKitPro are at [link redacted] .

He's not completely new; he's done some C and Lua, so it wouldn't be a dead start. Great information, thanks very much.

The way i started hacking, was to thinker game config files, or mess with game mods and see what are they made off. I actually did dis with only one game(Lock on), because i am not much of a gamer. Lock on was a good choice because i was obsessed with russian war planes and aviation, and because it had an active modding community. I regret not actualy learning how to make mods(other than skins for the planes) but i used to thinker a lot with config files and some of the simple mods.

If you're 16, and the most advanced thing you've done with your computer is to reinstall windows, a moddable game and notepad can do you a lot of good.

Plus, the game is really cool, i learned all sorts of stuff about planes, physics, tactics and i got to blow up American tanks with the Su-25's impressive arsenal.

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