Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing Made Easy

The contest is easy to read and the author provides internet links to programs you can download for free or low cost.

The content is based on the unix system and not pc but the concdepts still apply.

Very simple book to understand and work with. My only negativity Is that it walks you through many examples, but it doesn't provide you with a location to get the test examples. Wish they had provided this within the book...

This book is well written and gives an excellent overview of the stages of a pen test. So, it meets its stated objectives. Some topics are only cursory overviews and examples or exercises would be beneficial. Still, this book does contain many good examples that can easily be practiced at home.

I worked as an Information Assurance Officer, Chief Information Officer, Network Security Manager, 15 years light programming experience and had close to 20 years system administration, but no penetration testing experience.

I recently obtained my ECCouncil CEH certificate, and now I am gaining hacking and penetration experience. This book is Perfect for a beginner. It helped me get my feet wet. It provided practical examples. It's very easy to read, and I actually had fun reading it.

Recommend to beginners.

great book for beginners, here is all material needed to get to know what is hacking and pen testing, if you work on it you will get great results. I must o say also that it would be better if book came with hard cover, it's quality is kinda fragile, you should be careful with this book, don't leave pencil in it.

I would recommend this book for any beginner. It is truly a beginner's book, but explains from beginning to end. If just starting to PT, this book is the first one to get familiar with before proceeding to more technical books, as you will have an understanding of what tools to explore further.

For those of you wanting to learn the Pen-Testing basics in structured and well organized way, look no further. This book is a must have. Big kudos and thank you to Dr. P. Engebretson for a job well done.

This is a great introduction to a vast subject. This should be the first book you read on hacking and pen-testing if you are at the very beginning of the learning prosess. No doubt, you will feel much more confident on the issue after reading and understanding this book.

This book is a decent introduction to the topic of computer penetration. Emphasis on introduction. This should be clear to the reader already because of the title. That being said I am hard pressed to find any book I could recommend higher to any beginner in the field. Happy hacking. :)

I work for a small company with little resources for security when it comes to protection against people with malicious intent. We run our own web and data servers and have been hacked on at least on occasion. This book really helped me learn how to test my network for weaknesses. Gave me best practice tips for protecting our servers against unwanted penetration. Most of all it showed me how little I new about how easy it was to penetrate our network even with off the shelf applications. This book is a must for small businesses trying to run big business operations.

As a college student majoring in computer science, I have a strong interest in security and penetration testing. After looking around for a while for a good book to get me started, I settled on The Basics of Hacking and Pentesting, and I am very glad I did so. It was a great introduction to not only the tools involved in pentesting, but the concepts and techniques behind those tools, so you actually know how and why you are doing things.

The author takes you through setting up a great testing environment, and then proceeds to introduce every step of a successful penetration test, including all the tools and techniques. After reading this book, I have not only a solid foundation on and understanding of the tools and techniques of pentesting, I now know exactly what to research and learn further so that I can master those techniques.

Overall an excellent book for anyone looking to get into security and pentesting and one I would highly recommend.

This reference is outstanding. It is super easy to read and super easy to follow, even for beginners. Concepts are clearly explained with word illustrations used to help drive the points home. What I really appreciate about this book is that it is set up in the chronological order that you would use when carrying out a pen test. While an experienced person might find this volume basic it gives an outstanding foundation to build from, especially if you're just starting out in this field.

I work for a small company with little resources for security when it comes to protection against people with malicious intent. We run our own web and data servers and have been hacked on at least on occasion. This book really helped me learn how to test my network for weaknesses. Gave me best practice tips for protecting our servers against unwanted penetration. Most of all it showed me how little I new about how easy it was to penetrate our network even with off the shelf applications. This book is a must for small businesses trying to run big business operations.

I bought this book as an intro to penetration testing. As I apply my life long art and writing skills to web design, I want to be able to test the security of the sites I create. The book was well organized and easy to follow. I already work on a linux system and had all the various tools in Kali running by the end of the first day. Where the book falls short is in giving any deeper understanding of security flaws and best practice to avoid them when they are found. While the author goes to great length talking about the morality of hacking this concerns me. Any script kiddie can just download free software and follow the steps to start hacking the bad way. No real understanding necessary. At least the author did not share techniques for covering ones tracks. For a professional looking to test their own system this book is a good quick start. I suggest coupling it with "Hacking Exposed' for greater insight into best practices.

"The Basics of Hacking and Penetration Testing" is a great treatise on hacking and how to plan a successful penetration test, and a successful hack. It focuses on using tools in the Backtrack distribution of Linux, and divides a penetration test into recon, scanning, exploitation, web-based exploitation, maintaining access, and wrapping up the pentest with a tidy report. Each step but the last gives you three or four different approaches with different tools in the Backtrack framework. I think the whole book would have been perfect if it spent a small amount of time analyzing the code used to perform each task, or by giving a small program to perform each task, such as a custom port scanning tool or a custom exploit payload. This is the main thing that separates a script kiddie from a true hacker. I loved the book, though. It gives you a great place to start honing skills that will serve useful in the information age.

As someone who's new to penetration testing, but has been in the InfoSec field for a few years this book is a great resource! It walks you through setting up a pen testing lab and goes through various techniques in an easy to follow format. I've gone from reading blogs and forums with a vague idea of how to proceed with this to having a clear direction and able to formulate measurable goals for myself. Highly recommended!! Will be looking to purchase more of his books!