CYB 4212 units400 LevelSecond Semester

Ethical Hacking and Reverse Engineering

B.Sc. Cybersecurity, University of Uyo

Advanced offensive security: perimeter defences, privilege escalation, malware and social engineering, system and network hacking, web/wireless/mobile attacks, and reverse engineering of code and network exploits as a method for developing countermeasures.

On Areté, CYB 421 comes with

  • 2 recommended textbooks
  • an AI tutor that has read this course’s outline and notes
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Course outline

  1. 01Ethical hacking strategies; how perimeter defences work and how intruders escalate privileges
  2. 02Intrusion detection, policy creation, and social engineering
  3. 03Attack phases; footprinting, reconnaissance, and scanning networks
  4. 04Enumeration, system hacking, and malware threats; sniffing; physical security
  5. 05Password vulnerabilities and cracking passwords
  6. 06Denial of service, session hijacking; hacking web servers and web applications, SQL injection
  7. 07Hacking wireless networks and mobile platforms
  8. 08Evading IDS, firewalls, and honeypots
  9. 09Reverse engineering of code and network exploits for countermeasure development

Recommended textbooks

  • Hacking: The Art of Exploitation — Jon Erickson

    2nd ed. — the classic exploit development and low-level hacking text

  • Practical Malware Analysis — Sikorski & Honig

    The definitive malware analysis guide; pairs with lab work

How to pass CYB 421

  • Ghidra (from the NSA — free) is the primary tool for this course: practise weekly from 300L onward
  • Buffer overflows become clearer once you understand assembly and memory layout — invest the time
  • Malware.analysis.me and ANY.RUN provide safe malware samples and sandboxes for practice
  • OSCP certification aligns almost perfectly with this course — consider it post-graduation

Other 400 Level courses

Lecture notes, practice questions and the AI tutor for CYB 421 are available once you sign in.

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