Create a Hacker Index

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

Hello Friends,
Today’s post is about creating a little database to help you as you improve with your craft. I’m going to tell you what I’ve been doing to help me. As you know this industry is always changing, and there is always new information coming out, so I needed a way to keep track of things, and a way to get to the info when I needed.

// The Situation
I was on a pen test, and this test happened to have an API component to it. Now I’m not very familiar with APIs, because I had not encountered them in the past, so I was a bit lost. I asked a co-worker and he was kind enough to work with me and help me get started. In this field, APIs are showing up every where, so if you want to be a Pen Tester, you have to be familiar with this technology.

I went to YouTube, found some videos, took some notes, tried them out, but still not dice. On the side table next to my desk I have some books that I would use for reference, one of which is The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook, so I picked it up and went to the index to look for API. Well, that technology is all OVER this book, it shows up in multiple sections, so that got me thinking “I need to make this easier to search”. And that’s what my index is about.

// The Index
I use Notion as my weapon of choice, so naturally that’s where I went. I created a new page, and in that page an In-Line Table, this made life so much easier. At some point I will end up indexing this whole book, as well as my other reference books. At the moment, it is mostly API related, because that is the test that I’m working on.

This is going to be an ongoing project, I will index the topics that I’m testing, that way when I come across those topics again in future tests, I can use this table to quickly search the keyword and subject that I need to be able to get to the answer a little quicker.

// Conclusion
There you go.
Indexing your reference books will make your life a little easier, and finding the solution a little faster. I’m sure this index will grow as I progress on this path, and I already do have a “Resources” Database that has URLs of videos and articles that are related to APIs, but I wanted this indexing database to be just for my books.

I hope that was helpful.
Go (ethically) Hack The Planet.
[R/F]