Where can I learn the networking needed for hacking?

If you are doing Web Application hacking (websites) you might want to know background networking concepts such as reverse proxies, communicating with the internal network, spoofing ip headers and so on.

Networking skills dramatically upscale in need when conducting internal penetration tests, or even infrastructure testing. You will need to know how to interact and manipulate the environment, servers, routers and firewalls in order to reach your target - whether it be a system or domain controller (DC).

These types of networking skills can be learned in a number of ways, but theoretically not so much; moreso practical.

1. Get an internship or technical experience as a System Admin (SysAdmin) in a place like a school or small business.
2. Undertake one of the Cisco CCNA certificates - while this is oriented towards CISCO technologies it’s very relevant, teaches a lot about networking and gives you a cert that is chased after by companies and government security departments.
3. Do some research into setting up your own little home network. Some small, low-cost routers, servers and firewalls can be purchased on eBay and played with at home using video and course tutorials. On a low cost budget, start up some virtual machines or VMwareVsphere to imitate a network.
4. Set up your own wireless network, test the different authentication schemes, figure out their ranges, play with your wireless router options…

In regards to hacking/penetration testing, you don’t need to know the ins and outs of how to set up a certain routing protocol - but know what it does, how it functions and how using that information for your advantage may help you compromise the network.

This can you give you a headstart: http://www.securitytube.net/groups?operation=view&groupId=9 

How much knowledge of networking is required for hacking?

If you want to be a script kiddie who watches YouTube tutorials and uses pre existing tools to hack into vulnerable systems, then not so much.

If you want to be a REAL hacker who can write their own payloads and discover system vulnerabilities themselves, then you need to know A LOT of NETWORKING and NETWORK SECURITY theory.

For example if you want to carry out an ARP spoofing attack in order to acquire sensitive information from other systems you can use the tool ARPspoof to construct spoofed ARP packets and this might work on insecure networks but any network with a strong enough Intrusion Detection/Prevention System will easily figure out the attack. So in order to penetrate into a secure network (that’s what real hackers do), you will definitely need a detailed understanding of how ARP packets are constructed, the overall tcp/ip protocol suite, a little bit about routing and switching algorithms and at the very least intermediate encryption. Happy learning.

Where can I learn the networking needed for hacking?

If you are doing Web Application hacking (websites) you might want to know background networking concepts such as reverse proxies, communicating with the internal network, spoofing ip headers and so on.

Networking skills dramatically upscale in need when conducting internal penetration tests, or even infrastructure testing. You will need to know how to interact and manipulate the environment, servers, routers and firewalls in order to reach your target - whether it be a system or domain controller (DC).

These types of networking skills can be learned in a number of ways, but theoretically not so much; moreso practical.

1. Get an internship or technical experience as a System Admin (SysAdmin) in a place like a school or small business.
2. Undertake one of the Cisco CCNA certificates - while this is oriented towards CISCO technologies it’s very relevant, teaches a lot about networking and gives you a cert that is chased after by companies and government security departments.
3. Do some research into setting up your own little home network. Some small, low-cost routers, servers and firewalls can be purchased on eBay and played with at home using video and course tutorials. On a low cost budget, start up some virtual machines or VMwareVsphere to imitate a network.
4. Set up your own wireless network, test the different authentication schemes, figure out their ranges, play with your wireless router options…

In regards to hacking/penetration testing, you don’t need to know the ins and outs of how to set up a certain routing protocol - but know what it does, how it functions and how using that information for your advantage may help you compromise the network.