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TCM Academy

John Cardeccia

• 2 min read
Graphic for the Practical Ethical Hacking course, image belongs to TCM Security, Inc.
Image belongs to TCM Security, Inc

Howdy everyone,

I started a new course this week from the TCM Security Academy; Practical Ethical Hacking.  I learned about the course from a recent episode on David Bombal's YouTube channel, it one of a trilogy of courses recommended by Rana Khalil - David's guest for the episode.  I'm really enjoying the course and I plan to complete all three.

The course recommends some prior exposure to networking concepts - fortunately I just finished a networking course this semester - and so far there haven't been any concepts that required my diving down an internet rabbit hole...and I can't decide if I'm a little sad about that or not.  I'm about 15% through the material, meaning that could easily (or hopefully?) change.  As it stands, the course has been a high level look at networking, set up for virtual machines, and quite a bit of Linux and Python review.  The course doesn't throw the student into the deep end.  The videos walk the student through everything step by step, explaining not just the "how" but the "why".

There has been only one single hangup so far, it was with syntax during the bash scripting segment.  There was a "for" loop constructed as:

       " for ip in 'seq 1 254'; do "

This didn't work for me, when running the script the loop wasn't counting from 1 to 254 and was simply assigning the string "seq 1 254" to the "ip" variable.  After some trial, some error, and some Googling, I made a small correction and it worked.

      " for ip in $(seq 1 254); "

I'm still not sure why the presenter's syntax didn't work for me.  Perhaps it has something to do with the version of Kali Linux that they are running compared to my own?

Hopefully the next post will have something more exciting - I'm coming up on the section about Reconnaissance and I cannot wait!

Oh, before I sign off on this much-too-long blog post - if anyone hasn't checked out David Bombal's YouTube channel then stop reading and go there now.  It's an incredible source of both information and inspiration.  It's linked up in the first paragraph of this post.