10 Essential Tips for Aspiring Ethical Hackers
10 practical ethical hacking tips for beginners: certifications, labs, tools, mindset, and building your cybersecurity portfolio.
All articles published by
Hmmnm
Hands-on cybersecurity tutorials, CVE breakdowns, and guided learning paths. Every technique is explained, tested, and paired with its mitigation — so you learn the attack and the defense together.
Quantum-Resistant Encryption: The Race Before Q-Day
Quantum computers will eventually break RSA and ECC. Here are the finalized NIST post-quantum standards, how harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks make it today's problem, and the 5 steps to take before Q-Day.
Text4Shell: The 9.8 Severity Score That Wasn’t Log4Shell
CVE-2022-42889 in Apache Commons Text scored CVSS 9.8 but needed apps to interpolate attacker strings — most never did. The reachability-triage lesson.
Medibank 2022: The Ransom Refusal That Published Patients
Criminals entered Medibank via a contractor’s VPN credentials on a gateway without MFA, then dumped 9.7M customers’ health data after the ransom refusal.
Fortinet CVE-2022-40684: Admin Access Without a Password
A CVSS 9.8 authentication bypass let attackers add their own SSH keys to FortiOS admin accounts via crafted HTTPS requests. Exploited at disclosure.
WhatsApp’s 2022 Ring-Phase RCE: Code Execution Before You Answer
CVE-2022-36934 gave WhatsApp a CVSS 9.8 integer-overflow RCE that could execute during the video-call ring — before the victim answered. Zero interaction.
GTA VI Leak: When Your Slack Workspace Is the Vault
A Lapsus$-linked teenager allegedly reached Rockstar’s Slack via helpdesk social engineering and posted 90+ GTA VI dev clips. The collaboration suite was the vault.
Optus 2022: 9.8M Records, One Unauthenticated API, Zero Exploits
Australia’s second-largest telco exposed ~9.8M customer records via an API left unauthenticated in production. No zero-day, no phishing — just enumeration.
Magecart’s 2024 Resurgence: Skimming in the Polyfill.io Aftermath
Through 2024, digital skimming returned to threat reports’ front pages: Magecart-style attacks compromised hundreds of storefronts via compromised third-party JavaScript, supply-chain infections like polyfill.io’s June domain takeover injected malicious scripts into vast numbers of pages, and PCI DSS 4.0’s script-integrity requirements (6.4.3 and 11.6.2) approached their March 2025 enforcement deadline. This survey digests the modern skimming kill chain — injection, exfiltration, and evasion — the major 2024 campaigns, and the compliance clock turning client-side risk into boardroom math.
F5 BIG-IP Next Central Manager: The Unauthenticated Takeover Bugs
On November 6, 2024, F5 disclosed a pair of critical bugs in BIG-IP Next Central Manager shipped in its SPK fabric: CVE-2024-23327, an unauthenticated privilege-escalation path reachable via REST API, and CVE-2024-23328, a missing-authentication flaw letting attackers create arbitrary administrator accounts. Together they enable full takeover of a management node that itself commands a fleet of application delivery hardware. This account walks both paths, the same-day patches, and the uncomfortable lineage going back to CVE-2022-1388’s iControl REST flaw.
Ivanti Endpoint Manager RCE: Two Bugs, One Dangerous Chain
On October 16, 2024, Ivanti disclosed two vulnerabilities in Endpoint Manager (EPM) chained for pre-auth remote code execution: CVE-2024-29224, an unauthenticated SSRF rated 9.6, and CVE-2024-29226, a path traversal in a downstream service. The week’s disclosure calendar placed it days after FortiManager’s FortiJump and amid a year of Ivanti security crises — from January’s Connect Secure zero-days to September’s Cloud Service Appliance flaw. This account explains the chain mechanics, why consortium defenders pushed urgent patching, and the management-plane pattern of 2024.
FortiManager Zero-Day (FortiJump): CISA Escalation Explained
On October 23, 2024, Fortinet confirmed CVE-2024-47575 — a CVSS 9.8 missing-authentication flaw in the FortiManager FGFM protocol that China-nexus actor UNC5850 had exploited since summer to jump from exposed managers into fleets of managed FortiGates with a custom DeepMove implant. CISA KEV-listed it within days, forcing two-week patch deadlines across federal and enterprise fleets. This account reconstructs the protocol bug, the DeepMove persistence, the fleet-jump blast radius, and the management-plane hardening it made mandatory.
- Go to the previous page
- 1
- …
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- …
- 33
- Go to the next page