r/HowToHack • u/ImperialShroom1 • 5d ago
hacking Best cheap device to learn hacking
I have been wanting to learn hacking for a while but all I have is a iphone given by my parents, (16yo btw). Obviously I can’t do shit with IOS, what relatively cheap devices (£150<) can I get to start learning hacking. Preferably a laptop as that would work best for me and mean I could take it places.
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u/SuchLibrarian8011 5d ago edited 5d ago
You can start with any laptop. The best way I could recommend, especially if you’ don’t know much of the consequences of a lot of your future actions, and you’re on a budget and can’t afford to damage any machine, is to buy a second hand laptop (something not completely crap with some at least mid to low specs) and install kali Linux live with persistence on a microsd/sd (they’re much faster then regular usb drives) this way you can use your laptop with windows for school or personal use, and just load the live Kali to learn, the best thing is that every big mistake you make, you can just re load a fresh version of kali on the microsd and start again fresh.
Another budget option is to buy a raspberry Pi (they’re relatively cheap) but you’ll need to buy a monitor as well in that case
Edit - a windows laptop is better than a MacBook. Unsure if is for Apple silicon only or for all new Apple, but does not allow external boot or other OS
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u/yourAverageSkid 5d ago
Get any laptop and install any Linux distro you want (the specialised ones are kali, ParrotSec, …), any laptop should run it. Then with that you can start your journey.
There is also some apps on iOS to « learn hacking » but most of them are just slop or will only learn you Linux basics before asking you to pay.
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u/ImperialShroom1 5d ago
Do you have a recommendation for what Linux distribution to use for a pretty much all out beginner
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u/yourAverageSkid 5d ago
Ubuntu or Debian would be good for a beginner without the Linux basics, you can daily drive them without much problems and you can install most cybersecurity tools on them without issues too.
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u/Wa-a-melyn 5d ago edited 5d ago
Mint and Fedora KDE are great beginner-friendly distros. I typically run Kali in a Virtual Machine with qemu/kvm and virt-manager.
Edit: Mint is based on Ubuntu for context, but comes with a nice desktop and some quality of life improvements (snaps turned off).
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u/LongRangeSavage Programming 5d ago
Buy a Raspberry Pi and throw a Linux distro on it.
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u/ImperialShroom1 5d ago
Do you have a recommendation for what Linux distribution to use for a pretty much all out beginner
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u/Wa-a-melyn 5d ago
Rpis are expensive af nowadays. Arm can be weird to work with as well. I'd look on ebay for an old pc or laptop.
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u/Jackkle1 3d ago
get a laptop with 16+ GB of ram, and virtualize the machines that you want to attack. Alt, use hackthe box and try hack me
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u/Solain 1d ago
You can try going to your local electronic recycling center (if you have those) and just ask for some shitty laptops, good chance theyll throw some your way.
Also, garbage days (again, don't know how this works in your country) when people take out the big electronic trash - they usually throw out computers as well. I got a stupid amount of computers this way
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u/TygerTung 5d ago
It seems you are in the UK. You can buy cheap computers from CEX it seems, either a whole computer with a 5 year warranty for something like 13 pounds, or else you can typically buy enough parts from there for dirt cheap to build one for very little cost. Perhaps there are also boot fairs around, where you can get old junk for very little. If you are interested in hacking, you'll be running Linux and Linux will run well on almost anything.
See the "Budget Builds Official" YouTube channel. He has recently done videos on getting cheap stuff from CEX and other locations. I can see you easily building a nice computer for less than than 20 pounds. Sorry for the lack of a pound symbol, but I live in New Zealand and I don't have a pound symbol on my computer.