TDDE61 Ethical hacking

Course information

The purpose of this course is to increase your understanding of offensive security practices. This will allow you to engage in penetration testing activities (i.e., finding security flaws in systems so they can be fixed), as well as to better understand how systems are compromised and therefore be able to protect them.

The main part of the course is a lab series where your task will be to find a number of flags, where each flag corresponds to a successful system compromise. The setup is intended to mimic a realistic penetration situation, which means that you need to learn how to perform reconnaissance and vulnerablity identification without a step-by-step instruction on what you should do. Moreover, you will need to learn and master a wide set of tools that are needed to execute the necessary attack steps, again we will not tell you wich tool to use for which flag, this is something you need to discover as part of the lab exercises.

In addition to the penetration testing labs, the course has a series of guest lectures that are examined with quizzes after each lecture, a seminar on ethics of offensive security practices, as well as a mandatory test on laws and regulation that must be passed in order to get access to the system labs.

This course inspired from the Ethical Hacking course given at KTH by Pontus Johnsson. The lab series is based on the technical framwork developed by the team at KTH, and most of the flags are also taken directly from that course.

Page responsible: Mikael Asplund
Last updated: 2024-01-14