Advanced Network Attacks, Web Hacking, and Cryptography Course

Lesson 1 • TCP/IP Stack and Protocol Internals

Covers the layered protocol model, IP addressing, and TCP handshake mechanics. Establishes the mental model needed to understand how attacks exploit protocol behaviour.

Lesson 2 • Firewalls, NAT, and Network Segmentation

Examines stateful inspection, NAT traversal, and VLAN-based segmentation. Students learn to identify filtering rules that must be bypassed during penetration engagements.

Lesson 3 • Network Traffic Analysis with Wireshark

Teaches live and offline packet capture, filtering, and protocol dissection. Connects directly to later attack chapters by training students to observe malicious traffic patterns.

Lesson 1 • Vulnerability Scanning and Risk Prioritization

Uses automated scanners to identify known weaknesses and maps findings to severity scores. Students learn to filter false positives and prioritise targets for manual exploitation.

Lesson 2 • Passive Open-Source Intelligence Gathering

Covers WHOIS, certificate transparency logs, search engine dorking, and social media mining. Passive OSINT leaves no footprint on the target and is always the first recon phase.

Lesson 3 • Active Network Scanning with Nmap

Teaches host discovery, port scanning, service versioning, and OS fingerprinting using Nmap. Active scanning generates detectable traffic, so students learn timing and evasion options.

Lesson 4 • Service Enumeration and Banner Grabbing

Extracts version strings, configuration details, and user lists from exposed services. This data feeds directly into vulnerability identification and exploit selection.

Lesson 1 • DNS Spoofing and Cache Poisoning

Manipulates DNS responses to redirect victims to attacker-controlled servers. Covers both local network spoofing and remote cache poisoning against resolvers.

Lesson 2 • Password Attacks and Credential Exploitation

Covers online brute-forcing, credential stuffing, and offline hash cracking against network services. Students apply captured hashes and credentials to gain authenticated access.

Lesson 3 • Man-in-the-Middle Interception and SSL Stripping

Chains ARP poisoning with traffic interception to capture credentials and session tokens. SSL stripping downgrades HTTPS connections to expose plaintext data.

Lesson 4 • Exploitation Frameworks and Payload Delivery

Introduces Metasploit for selecting, configuring, and launching exploits against enumerated services. Students learn payload staging, handler setup, and session management.

Lesson 1 • Web Application Enumeration and Mapping

Discovers hidden directories, parameters, and endpoints using automated tools and manual browsing. Complete application mapping ensures no attack surface is overlooked.

Lesson 2 • Web Proxy Setup and Traffic Manipulation

Configures Burp Suite as an intercepting proxy to inspect, modify, and replay web requests. Proxy mastery is the core skill enabling all manual web vulnerability testing.

Lesson 3 • Authentication and Session Management Analysis

Analyses login mechanisms, session token entropy, and cookie security attributes. Weaknesses found here are exploited in later chapters on authentication bypass.

Lesson 1 • CSRF, SSRF, and Security Misconfigurations

Exploits cross-site request forgery, server-side request forgery, and common server misconfigurations. SSRF is particularly critical for cloud-hosted applications.

Lesson 2 • Cross-Site Scripting: Reflected, Stored, and DOM

Demonstrates all three XSS variants, from payload crafting to session hijacking and phishing. Students learn context-aware encoding bypass to defeat common filters.

Lesson 3 • SQL Injection: Detection and Exploitation

Teaches manual and automated SQL injection across error-based, blind, and out-of-band channels. Students extract databases, bypass authentication, and escalate to OS command execution.

Lesson 4 • Command Injection and File Inclusion Attacks

Exploits server-side command execution and file inclusion to achieve remote code execution. These attacks leverage insufficient input validation on the server.

Lesson 1 • Hashing, MACs, and Integrity Attacks

Covers cryptographic hash functions, HMAC construction, and attacks including length extension and collision. Integrity failures enable forgery of tokens, signatures, and file checksums.

Lesson 2 • TLS Protocol Analysis and Downgrade Attacks

Analyzes TLS 1.2 and 1.3 handshakes and exploits legacy cipher suites and downgrade vulnerabilities. TLS weaknesses directly enable network interception attacks.

Lesson 3 • Padding Oracle and Cryptographic Side-Channel Attacks

Exploits padding validation errors and timing differences to decrypt ciphertext without the key. These attacks demonstrate that implementation flaws can break mathematically sound algorithms.

Lesson 4 • Symmetric Encryption and Block Cipher Modes

Covers AES internals, block cipher modes, and the security implications of each mode. Understanding cipher modes is essential for attacking padding oracles and ECB weaknesses.

Lesson 1 • Server-Side Template Injection

Identifies and exploits template injection in popular engines to achieve remote code execution. SSTI requires recognizing template syntax and engine-specific payload construction.

Lesson 2 • XML and Deserialization Vulnerabilities

Exploits XXE injection and insecure deserialization to read files, perform SSRF, and achieve RCE. These vulnerabilities require understanding of data serialization formats.

Lesson 3 • Web Cache Poisoning and HTTP Request Smuggling

Exploits caching infrastructure and HTTP parsing discrepancies to poison responses and smuggle requests. These advanced techniques affect large-scale web infrastructure.

Lesson 4 • API Security Testing and GraphQL Attacks

Tests REST and GraphQL APIs for authentication flaws, injection, and excessive data exposure. API attack surface differs significantly from traditional web applications.

Lesson 1 • Privilege Escalation on Linux and Windows

Identifies and exploits misconfigurations, weak permissions, and kernel vulnerabilities to gain root or SYSTEM access. Privilege escalation is the critical step between foothold and full compromise.

Lesson 2 • Persistence and Defense Evasion

Establishes persistent access through scheduled tasks, registry keys, and web shells while evading detection. Students understand attacker persistence to better design defensive controls.

Lesson 3 • Penetration Test Reporting and Communication

Structures findings into executive summaries and technical reports with reproducible proof-of-concept steps. Clear reporting translates technical findings into actionable remediation guidance.

Lesson 4 • Lateral Movement and Pivoting Techniques

Uses compromised hosts as pivot points to reach otherwise inaccessible network segments. Pivoting extends the attack into internal networks discovered during reconnaissance.