So if you look at these two strings of text, the one at the top it says, what you, your brain will automatically put that together and what it says is, can you read this now type it. Even though all the letters are completely out of whack, your brain auto completed, auto fixed it and arranged the characters in a way that you could read it. This is something that we all do. Part of the reason that works is because you've read these words and these combinations of letters literally millions of times and we'll talk about that in just a sec. Now, if I give you the second line and look at that, when you think about that, it doesn't go as quickly. And here's a test I've done with students over the years and I've proved this to be 100% true. Most of them can type and correct this first line faster than they can type that second line. And there's a critical reason for that. Because in that first line, you're not actually reading this by each letter, what you're doing is you're taking that your brain is auto correcting it to what you see in the green there. And how it's doing that is because when you're reading it, you're actually reading it in blocks like what you see here. Because this is how we read and this is how we absorb our information and the language that we learn to read in. So what ends up happening is the word can, think about how many times you've read that. So if you think about it and use it as using a tool you've used a tool the word can millions of times. Every time you write it, every time you read it in a sentence you're exercising that in your brain, it's becoming part of your brain. But if you look at the line at the bottom the nmap-sS, how many times have you typed the word nmap? Most of you probably never. How many times have you typed a dash of little s and a big S in sequence with each other. Most of you probably never have. How many times have you done -p 80, 224 together in a sequence? Most of you probably never. How many of you typed 10.11.1.34? Most of you never that's an IP address. What this is, it is a common string that we would type for example to run an nmap scan. That is to run a hacking tool or a pin test tool against an IP address which is like a phone number for computers. To see which if ports 80 and port 24 are open on that device. And we're telling it to fragment the packets with the dash f at the end. Now, the reason I could type this string and we tested this as well. I can type this string almost as fast as I can type the first string. [INAUDIBLE] because I've typed this nmap command literally thousands of times or combinations of it. So your challenges is you've never type this when you type the can, you read this, you actually type it or read it in blocks. So you're not really looking at each letter individually. Whereas, when you type this nmap command you're forced to actually look at and process each individual character and that slows you down. So this goes back to what we talked about earlier where, when you're typing these commands suddenly, you're going so slow that by the time the lab session is up or you're supposed to move on. You've completely forgotten exactly what it is you were typing at the time. You get to the end, you've typed all these things, you get the thumbs up, you feel happy that you completed this exercise but you forgot what it was you were learning at the time. And that's based 100% on this phenomenon here. Now, there's a lot of studies. You can go look at some of the stuff from some of the universities, Harvard, MIT and others that have done tons of studies on this. But the point I'm trying to make to you is it's not that you needed more Linux or Windows. What you needed was more hands on repetitions doing these various combinations of strings so that you can recall them quicker. Which means you can focus your brain more on learning the lesson that you're doing in that exercise versus actually just trying to type the strings right, right? Now, the first string represents patterns you've seen before. The second string patterns you've not seen before. And I have a solution for this and some of the exercises will work on in the later courses. So specifically, you've used words like can and you millions of times reading and recognizing them counts as using, it's not just typing but also using. Because if you are a good typist or if you've been typing for a part of your life, you're not thinking of every character as you type it, it kindacomes naturally for you. And when you have to think about each character individually, which is what happens when you type words that you've never seen before or characters, strings that you've never seen before. It forces you to go back to that archaic way of looking at each character individually and we just don't function well that way. Our brains don't work that way, okay? Here's another string to try. Now, what this is, this is actually a very common filter that I would use in something like wire shark or TCP dump. To say, I only want to see the traffic that's coming from and going to the IP address of 172.16.78.102 and only traffic going to or coming from ports 5986. Now, I know your intro, so none of half of what I said just didn't make any sense to you. What's really going on there is we're looking for traffic to and from Power Shell connections. And you might not know what Power Shell is now but you will later when we get into the ones command line. Why? Because in the world of hacking, a lot of hackers and threat actors will exploit your systems and move back and forth using Power Shell. And this is something that we look for in traffic oftentimes because if you think about it. If you have a secretary that basically does secretary work all day and you have an executive that simply answers emails and brokers deals all day, why would they ever be using Power Shell? The answer is that they wouldn't. So one of the things that we look for commonly when we're doing investigations is for strings like this. Now what I want you to think about is if I'm teaching you what I just said and you're trying to remember that while also trying to type this foreign string here that you've never typed before, there's no familiarity there whatsoever. Other than maybe the word port, now your brain has to go into slow motion to type this. And the learning of what I just said about Power Shell and how hackers use it, most of that's not going to retain because it's kind of move to the side so that you can focus on typing the string. And as you continue to do that over and over and over, a lot of the important lessons you move to the side just to type the string. And again by the time you get to the end, you've forgotten a lot of lessons. So we're going to take you through this and have you type these things a bunch so that once you get into that cybersecurity course, it's not an issue anymore.
