Open-sourcing

Hey there, this is going to be a little different from the previous posts. As I have planned from the beginning, I want to do these diary or journal-like posts where I talk about my experience as a beginner and here we are 🙂 .

This post is going to be about my and my friend’s new project HTTPEnum. HTTPEnum is going to be a website enumeration tool. There are a lot of features that we plan on adding but not sure yet what will make the final cut 😀 . The main purpose is not to make a competitive tool for ethical hacking but to hone our skills in programming and learn how GitHub really works.

As the title suggests this is an open-source project on GitHub that everybody can contribute to. The tool is written in C++ because this is a language that would be useful for all of us if we could get better at.

Right now we only plan to make it available on Windows and the reason is because the tool is going to use the WinSockAPI. As I understand the WSA is a built WinAPI DLL that is native on every system so the tool could be used just by running the .exe file. This is also what limits the usage for Windows only.

So let’s talk about the tool a little bit. The very first step would be to make it send an HTTP GET request to a specified domain. For this, we need to implement the WSA (and also figure out how to actually use it 😀 ) and an argument system where we can parse the URL with a given flag. The tool right now can only display a bare-bone help menu and has no WSA implemented at all.

On the GitHub side, we managed to figure out a few interesting features that the site offers. We implemented a few workflows (not major ones, just enough to teach us the basics) and we finally started to understand how a git repository works where multiple people work on the same project. It is a very fun experience, we are learning tons so I would recommend every beginner to do things like these.

There is no need to come up with your own project as I know it requires persistence and a lot of free time, something that beginners don’t always have, but there are a lot of open-source repos online that you can contribute to. It doesn’t have to be a world-changing feature that you add, it could be as small as just making some code cleaner or adding a few useful lines. The point is to gain some experience. It also helps out a lot in early interviews because they are looking for somebody who is different or more than the average.

Juniors in Cybersecurity

Since I also touched on this let’s talk a little bit about how to be more than the average. This is exactly how. Add some life to your GitHub profile use it, and make it look nice, you can also start blogging as I did, it is okay to tell your experience and knowledge to the world even if you are not a professional yet. Make your LinkedIn appealing and share all the courses that you finished. For example, there are very good beginner courses on TryHackMe that walk you through things. Don’t be afraid to share that you completed them because it adds value to you and this is what every beginner needs, to be more than the others.

These do not seem like big changes but together they make you more appealing and as a junior, there is nothing else that we can use. There is also the option of doing beginner-level certificates but that costs more often than not a lot so not every newcomer can do those straight away.

I am planning on making a more in-depth post about what beginners can do so let’s leave it at that. I am always happy to help so if you have any questions please leave a comment and I will try to get back to you as soon as possible. Juniors should help each other out 😀 .

See you at my next post!

Thank you for reading!
Sincerely,
B4D4M.