Build. Hack. Secure: Engineering an Ethical Hacking Lab
Students building custom wordlists with Crunch.Copyright North Valleys High School, Washoe Schools 2025
This activity provides a foundation for ethical hacking by using tools in Kali Linux to analyze and attack a target system, Metasploitable2. Students learn about ethical hacking, containers, and network engineering as they use Docker to build and connect their own hacker and target systems. They identify and install necessary tools on Kali Linux, including Nmap to scan the target for open ports and running processes. This information helps them create efficient username and password lists, or "dictionaries," using Crunch. The activity culminates with students using Hydra to brute-force crack the target system's passwords with their custom wordlists.
Ethical hacking applies a systematic, disciplined, and quantifiable approach to solving problems and designing solutions. It is a form of reverse engineering for cybersecurity and the verification and validation branch of network and security engineering. Instead of building a system, ethical hackers deconstruct it to find flaws and use that knowledge to design stronger defenses.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Understand how to detect system network vulnerabilities.
- Develop customized wordlists to crack both usernames and passwords.
- Explain the connection between usernames, passwords, and hash protocols (md5, sha1, sha256).
- Ethically hack into a system and brute-force crack both usernames and passwords.
- Discuss solutions to secure systems from threat actors.