To be able to hack successfully, you need to think like a hacker and you need to be able to manipulate programs easily to archive the desired results.  Sometimes you enter a newsgroup and I guarentee that there will always be someone who asks "how do you hack hotmail?"  Has it ever occured to them that Microsoft isn't stupid and would be monitoring the newsgroup.  Even if there was a way to hack it, putting the exploit in a newsgroup would be suicide.  I have seen evidence of companies monitoring newsgroups.  On a 3D studio max channel someone was asking for a tutorial that was on the 2nd CD... Unless their copy was pirated.  The conversation went downhill from there.  People were implying that they were pirating the software and a couple of threads later, someone from Discreet (the company that was formally known as kinetix), the company that makes 3DSM posted a message acknowledging that they were monitoring the newsgroup. People pissed themselves and the newsgroup was empty for days.  

Hacking a server isn't always simple.  Although many servers aren't protected well, hacking major servers is difficult as they are protected and you would have to use your own exploits.  Also, remember that physical hacking isn't your best tool.  Recently, Microsoft wasn't hacked by using physical hacking, an action that would have been easily detected, but by convincing a secretary working there to run a trojan horse on their system.  Doing that was a simple act of social engineering and is probably the best method of hacking most systems.  Also, the reason that the person who hacked the system wasn't caught was because nobody knew he hacked it, he didn't brag.  At this moment, there is probably one guy laughing to himself because he has the source code to one of the most protected products/trojan horses in the world.  Although you probably dont believe the source code is helpful, he can easily find exploits for Windows 98 and probably knows nearly every trick in the book.  

Attempt to think about the programming code.  If you know C++, attempt to think what simple errors could be made and where there might not be assertions to protect against them.  The OOB nuke was very simple, adding a couple of bits to a packet caused 80% of operating systems to crash, just because no-one programmed in assertions/safe-guards to protect against these problems.

The best methods of social manipulation by the way, aren't always obvious and dont always involve you talking to a person in some cases...

If the target is small, etc a small computer network and you find something that might be of danger to you DONT HESITATE TO RUN A DOD complient format program on it.  if you think you are in danger and know there is a firewall but can't find the logs in the program files, kill the system.  Running a program which kills the harddisk by marking the first sectors as bad will not be effective.  I only recommend doing this if you are in danger.  Also, DONT leave a Handy doc file made in MS office on there computer to warn them they have an exploit.  DOC files store ALOT of information on the originating computer.  Just leave a txt file if you must leave anything.

There are many different ways to perform a hack.  For example, if you wanted to hack into a website, you could look at the link and work out the username, which you could use to bruteforce the ftp server.  However, another method that can be used is to send a fake email to your targets website that immitates the websites administrators, asking him to write in his username and password or his account will time out.   The graphics could be linked directly from an original page.  A form-to-post server could be used to post the username and password from the fake htm format email, to an anonymous email account.  While bruteforcing is more reliable in this case, the anonymous email is much  quicker and in some cases easier.


If a well protected system looks easy to hack, Chances are that it isn't.  Always be suspicious, thats what major companies do.  If you take credit for someone elses work and brag about it in a newsgroup, even though the company that was hacked will doubt it was you, you will find 10 FBI agents outside your door the next day.  You must remember that security is a main priority.  Even if you are busted for no reason and you dont think you have anything to hide, the FBI will find something.  I recommend that you encrypt your harddisk because even files that are deleted can be recovered.  If you encrypt your harddisk with a good alagorathm, chances are that the FBI wont be able to unencrypt it and anything on your harddisk will be safe.  Please dont encrypt it with the EFS in Win2K, that isn't difficult to crack.  Also, if someone hacks into your computer, they wont be able to obtain anything helpful.  Also, if you know you will get caught wipe the harddisk using a government complying wipe program and then run a magnet past the harddisk...  hahaha data will be gone and even very sensitive tools will be incapable of recovering anything. Now, all you need to do is worry about any pirated software or hacking books you got and u will be a happy chappy ;)   