To be a professional hacker - not just a script-kiddie - you must develop some coding/scripting capabilities. Often, we need to automate some commands - at a minimum - or write new original code for such things as rootkits and other exploits. In any case, to become a professional hacker, you need to have some basic scripting/coding skills. I will attempt to get you started here on some basic scripting, but will return to more advanced scripting later in the course.
The more you know in this area, the better you will become. Ideally, the professional hacker has some C, Java, Python, Perl, and Ruby capabilities, but at a very minimum, the professional hacker must be able to write simple BASH scripts. This module is dedicated to writing simple scripts in the Bourne Again Shell or BASH. For those of you with good BASH scripting skills, please bear with us. You may want to skip directly to the exercise for this lesson.
Although the various Linux distributions ship with multiple shells, the BASH shell is contained on nearly all of them and is probably the most popular shell.
In this module, we will develop a simple script to scan a network for the availability of a particular port. I am assuming a basic understanding of the BASH shell and nmap scanning.
