Depends, what kind of hacking you want to get into?
Crack software, network security, database...

Cracking software is kind of pointless. The net is endless with cracks and activations etc it was fun years ago, I'm not interested in learning how to build my own cracks. Something with a little more punch, something a little more exciting...

>>16655338
Hacking the matrix?
You have to be more specific.
Anyway learn some programming language first.

I'm fluent with html and dabbled in php / java script. What is the best language to learn? And yes hacking the matrix sounds good lol have a good walk through? When you say network security you mean gaining full access to someone's network or just hacking free WiFi?

>>16655359
Those aren't real programming language, by which I mean they aren't useful.
Learn Python, also yes, network security is gaining access to someone network.
Hacking the WI-fi is either a 30 sec job or days, depending on the security.
Are you talking commercial network?
Watch out, they can and will prosecute you.

Commercial networks, yes. Surely there is a way I can learn this with a legal point of view - providing the service of finding holes in people's to improve their security... I'll look into python, is it a hard language to learn?

People's networks*

>>16655317
hate to break it to you. but hacking isnt anywhere near as exciting as you think.
You have to be on the inside already to hack. A hacker is just able to navigate the code without a guide. 321ABDE8
A hacker can look at that and WRITE A PROGRAM to interpret that in large quantities. Those vids where people just read machine code is bs. You would have had to dedicate you life to that.

When you get a buzz out of playing with html code for 5 or 6 hours at a time there has got to be something more ;)

The famous 4chan and this is the best advice on the subject? (Y)

Base 16 (Hexadecimal):321abde8

I am going to suggest a Website and a book. The site is "http://vim-adventures.com". The book is "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks".

Although hackers often work with technology, that side of things is far less important than outsiders believe. It has to be: technology changes so rapidly in today's world that the technological skills you use all the time today will be only occasionally useful in two years: never quite zero, but very close. I will not tell you how I learned, for example, because it wouldn't work for you: it was too long ago.

What DOESN'T change is the mindset. A hacker learns what he needs to learn as he goes along, and has to get very good at it: the book (or its sequel) will help you with this. A hacker is also always looking to apply those skills to tasks in unusual ways, hoping to find new opportunities to leverage them: thus, the Website (which is for, of all things, a text editor).

There's my advice. Yeah, it's weird. But in the current technological climate, I think it's probably the best way to get the fundamental skills that run deeper than any specific technology. Once you have these, you'll know what you need to do next.

>>16655369
>Those aren't real programming language, by which I mean they aren't useful.
Don't be so quick to dismiss either of those. I'd argue that PHP and JavaScript, with the longstanding lax security practices associated with each language, are actually quite useful for a hacker to learn. When you know how they work, and what pitfalls need to be avoided in order to make good software with them (which is certainly possible, just not the path of least resistance), it becomes much easier to break things you know are written in them, and because they're so popular, there's a LOT of code written in them. You know the common mistakes that the programmers are most likely to have made, and this makes it much easier to test for holes.

This is actually true of any language. I don't mean to pick on PHP and JavaScript as bad languages: they're not. I make my living programming in both, plus a number of others. But their popularity, combined with their history of encouraging poor practices, means that even though they've both cleaned up their acts since the bad old days, there's still a LOT of bad code out there. And bad code makes for excellent learning material.

>>16655317
>Subject says it all, give me the best place to start...

if you're old enough to be posting on this board, and you don't already know how to do it ... it's far too late for you to learn now.

>>16655382
People like that certainly exist. They're called penetration testers, 'red team' hackers (the 'blue team' provides the opposite service -- trying to fix security holes) or, informally, 'white hat' hackers. If you learn your shit and get good, the market for that is pretty good right now. It takes a while to get that good, though.

And to get that good you do have to actually be interested in this stuff, not just caught up in the vague glamour of being a 'hacker' or interested in reading your girlfriend's email or whatever. As other people have mentioned, a good first step is to really learn a programming language. Python's a good choice, it's dead useful and one of the easiest to pick up. Java (not Javascript) is also a good choice, PHP isn't a terrible one, Perl would have been my recommendation 10 years ago but it's slowly (slowly!) being superseded by Python. There's no 'best' first language to learn. Just do 15 mins of research on each and pick one. Pick Python if nothing else leaps out at you or you don't have the knowledge yet to even parse the hits of information you're receiving.

Get yourself a decent book and start learning -- it's been a good few years since I bought a beginner's programming book so I'm afraid I can't recommend any good ones any longer -- study it at your own pace and mess around for a good few months. Before too long you'll have a better idea 1. of whether you're actually interested enough in this sort of thing to pursue it and eventually get into computer security (it takes a lot of knowledge) and 2. of what direction you want to move towards (in terms of what languages and skills to study further, etc) next.

To the author of this post "if you're old enough to be posting on this board, and you don't already know how to do it ... it's far too late for you to learn now." It sounds like you doubt yourself a lot. Never ever stop learning my friend, it is a great thing we can do.

Believe me when I say it isn't a phase. I've spent my life playing with computers and technology, always breaking the 'rules' as such. My income comes from a business I've built in I.T. I did get the advice I was looking for and it does sound like an understanding of python is what I need. One website and a book I'll check out - if anyone knows of or can show me a few things that will make my journey easier don't hesitate to share :)