So here’s the situation. This kid on Discord with a Hackerman profile picture is telling you that they are going to “hack your IP address” and “DDOS your Wi-Fi router” using Kali Linux or Parrot OS or something. They might even send you a screenshot of some sort of “hacking command”. And you are now thinking, “wo my gad thees person is going to yack me what do I do nau???????” You don’t need to do anything, except maybe laugh at them. Because – and I want to make this very clear – They. Are. Lying. They CAN’T hack you – the people at your ISP, or Internet Service Provider, are way smarter than 14 year old kids, and YOU ARE SECURE – as long as you haven’t given them any serious personal information, like usernames or passwords or OTPs or something. If you have, change it. Right now. GO! And with that out of the way, let’s get onto the details.
[This is the script for my video on Kali Linux “hackers” which will be uploaded to YouTube, Odysee and PeerTube.]
[Update: This will not be uploaded for a long time as I’m not free.]
INTRO
Before we begin, I just want to clarify that I am in fact not any sort of cybersecurity or hacking expert. Actually, I haven’t even bothered to try Kali Linux ever, because I know very well it contains nothing which would be of interest to either me, or, well, the Discord kids. I’ll get into the details of hacking and how it relates to Kali Linux, but first of all, let’s have the meanings of some of the technical jargon these “hackers” typically use.
Your IP address is something which is used to recognise your particular router – which is probably a modem kept somewhere near a landline telephone – whenever it connects you to the internet. This is a set of numbers, and they can’t be used to identify you or anything about you personally – except your rough geographic region, like your state or possibly a nearby city, which is not necessarily the one you are actually living in. in the country. For example, if you are in Chandigarh, your location can be shown as Chandigarh, but it may also be Delhi, Gurgaon, Amritsar, Dehradun… You get the idea. This address also frequently changes – at least, with most ISPs. ISPs, or Internet Service Providers, are the companies which you pay to give internet access, like AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, or BSNL. It is generally NOT a very big deal if someone does get your IP address, because there’s hardly anything they can actually do with it. The most common way for someone to get your IP address is to make you click on an IP Logger link, which is a regular link to a video or a website or anything, except that it goes through a third-party website, which tracks your IP address and logs it for the person who sent you that link, and then sends you on to whatever website or URL the guy wanted you to see. Which brings us to the first piece of advice, which is:
DON’T CLICK ON ANY URLs YOU GET FROM SOMEONE YOU DON’T KNOW, especially if it has something like “IP logger” or “crack licence key 100% working 2023” in it.
Next up: DDOS. Distributed Denial of Service. This is a type of cyberattack which is targeted towards servers where the attacker takes an entire army of computers and all of them try to access the target at the same time, which promptly crashes under the load. If you get DDOSed, which you won’t, because DDOS attacks require the aforementioned several computers, you will probably not face any issues, because your router can easily handle it – I’ll get onto how in a minute.
Kali Linux, and Parrot OS are Linux based operating systems intended for pentesting. If you don’t know what Linux is… well, welcome to my channel, it’s nice to have you here. Please like share and subscribe. Linux is just another operating system, like Windows, macOS or Chrome OS for Chromebooks. There are many versions of Linux for different use cases, and it is, at least in my opinion, far better and faster than other operating systems, and that is all you need to know. Pentesting stands for penetration testing, which is the process where a company or website pays a hacker to check whether or not they are able to infiltrate the company’s servers using glitches, exploits and security holes. This is an example of ethical hacking. Both Kali Linux and Parrot OS are Linux based operating systems with several tools for pentesting and digital forensics. These are intended to be used by ethical hackers hired to make sure there are no security issues in a server which can be exploited by someone outside, or even inside the company.
A question you may now be thinking about is that if the hackers can use Kali Linux to try and penetrate, like, actual servers, what’s stopping the Discord guy from getting access to everything you own? The answer is actually very simple: the servers actually have to interact with the rest of the internet, and therefore have to allow some access to its users. It has to make sure these users can only access what the server wants them to. Your home network, on the other hand, doesn’t have to cater to anyone. It can simply block everything trying to access you without having to worry about whether it is a legitimate request or not – for your router, there are no legitimate reasons for anyone to contact you in such a way. This is essentially what firewall means.
And that is why, if someone has your IP address and uses Kali Linux, you still probably have nothing much to worry about. And if you are now interested in how the internet works, which I touched briefly during the explanation, you may like the article on this same topic I wrote on my blog a couple of years ago.
If you really want to learn hacking, simply downloading Kali Linux and hanging around on Discord obviously isn’t the way. As I said, I’m not really an expert on hacking or cybersecurity. But I recommend learning things like how the internet works, like its structure and its design, as it will really give you a feel as to what you are stepping into. Obviously, knowing a programming language will be really helpful so that you can automate your work and learn the basics of computer logic. Also, I think should invest in learning how to use your computer beyond the basics, like using the command line and the filesystem structure of whatever OS you are using. There are several courses online, and sometimes also offline, which you can take.
Also, about the screenshots of the Discord conversation I had in the beginning – it was posted on Reddit on the Linux memes subreddit, and it got a decent amount of upvotes, ON THE DAY I WROTE THIS SCRIPT! So you can tell that this a fairly regular occurrence. If this does happen to you, do share this video with them. They may try to deny that it applies to them, but you should probably block them before it gets to that.
And that’s it for this video! If you liked this video, please do the needful, and if you didn’t, feel free to dislike this video, because your dislike will be thrown into /dev/null anyway.