I know it might sound stupid, but as we have talked previous, gathering information is important for the ninja to create good strategies to win his battles. Without information we are not fighting efficiently. And let’s face it; most information today is stored on computers.

To exercise understanding computers I would recommend people to learn to install GNU/Linux either as dual boot or virtualized through VMware or similar software for virtualization. If you already are running GNU/Linux it means you most likely already have learned a lot of computer skills. However; most of you might prefer running Mac or MS Windows, and please continue do so. I would recommend you started by installing once virtualized just to understand the basic installation process, and maybe read a bit on partitioning. That will be the real challenge for some; to be able to create partitions both for Linux and for MS Windows without destroying the current windows installation. It’s not so difficult, but you should attempt to understand partitioning and file systems. Later you can learn how to encrypt your GNU/Linux partition, or creating additional partitions of 10 GB where you keep secret work files. The idea is simply to understand computer. You will also shortly after starting learn that it’s really easy to access MS Windows files (I am unsure of Mac files), but rather complicated to view files you have on your GNU/Linux system from Windows, in particular if you have encrypted parts of your system.

Next you should learn to do basic administration tasks from the shell. You can look at tools for partitioning the disks, for how to set up and manage users, how to work with various systems that might be needed during administrating a work place. Don’t use to much time on this, but use enough to gather skills to quickly do tasks typing and executing instead of clicking and waiting for the GUI. It’s only important you understand basic file, user management and maybe some to investigate logs to understand where information is stored if you do mistakes as typing wrong password. Again, just for you to understand the system, and being able to understand basic computer security system.  Once you have looked at the log files you might start to learn to monitor process currently working; simply just how to monitor and start/stop processes, services and so on.

Next you might start setting up a simple Apache, PHP, MySQL system, and create a small website. Again, only to understand the basic of how websites are created. IT might also be interesting to create a ftp server to upload files too.

The basic idea is to gather basic information on understand partitioning, file systems, encryption, monitoring the system and how server/clients work. This way you will be more efficient both in securing your own private data, and maybe to access data from other computers (DO NOT DO THIS AS IT IS ILLEGAL – if you find security weaknesses, report them and you might get successful in computer security.