To develop in cybersecurity, it is vastly important to keep a growth mindset. Always be learning. In order to allow that, it helps to have the right tools available. One important tool is a dedicated computer for hacking activities such as participating in training labs, testing tools, or learning new methodologies. I reset a Macbook Pro, keeping the intending macOS and installed VMware fusion for running virtual machines (VM) including Kali linux.

Sauna is another “easy” Windows machine on HackTheBox. However I definitely fell down my fair share of rabbit holes on this one. There’s a static website hosted here, so I thought it’d start with a web shell. However, this box turned out to to be entire about domains and LDAP. Which I have very little experience with to date. While this blog may sound like a straight path, it’s well edited to be stream lined.

Remote was a fun windows box to hack. This is my second active target on HTB. My first was Traceback. Check that out for a similar web based exercise on Linux. Remote starts with a web vulnerability but requires finding credentials in a public share. DLL Hijacking is required to get a system shell. Lessons learned: Mounting a public windows share Exploit modifications – changing python code for a web exploit DLL Hijacking for privilege escalation Information gathering An initial nmap scan reveals some listening services.

Thanks to a zoom call with members of PA Hackers. I fully exploited my first active HTB machine where I got points for my effort. To celebrate getting root, here’s my write-up. I learned quite a lot with this machine. It introduced me to new PHP web shells and message of the day (motd) privilege escalation. Lessons Learned Open Source INTelligence (OSINT) refresher with Google and Github PHP web shell alternatives to php-reverse-shell.

Friends among my various hacker spaces have shared links to a new tool called Updog created by Sc0tfree. A python3 implementation of an HTTP server that is intended to replace Python2’s SimpleHTTPServer module. I had to test it out myself and these are my opinions. In many hacker training courses, it is vital to be able to host your tools on a web server to download them onto target machines. One example would be to download a network scanning tool once you’ve gained a shell on the first machine of a target network.

In this hour long podcast episode, I reviewed a lot of what I have done and what my current projects are. For this year, my goals are to get the OSCP and find a position at Offensive Security that is in the information security realm instead of development. Apart from studying, I’m also trying to help the Kali team with getting official cloud versions available on AWS and Azure with each new Kali release.

Have you ever wanted to be a 1337 hacker like you see in the movies? Metasploit automates some of the harder tasks related to penetration testing. This blog post is a quick setup to install two virtual machines that will allow you to explore how to use Metasploit. Step 1: Get files needed to create the VMs Download VirtualBox Download Kali for VirtualBox Clone Metasploitable2 Step 2: Setup Kali Open VirtualBox, click File > Import Appliance.

I’ve had a couple posts about Kali on here already. But I still haven’t had a chance to fully get in to it myself. I know, it’s tragic right? Well for those who know less than I do about it; Kali is a linux distro from Offensive Security that comes packed with tools and programs that make hacking easy. However carrying around a computer for work, one for class, one with Windows, and a tablet or two isn’t really an option, unless your bag is designed for 80lbs.

If you’ve never played with BASH/terminal or you don’t know what Linux is. I suggest you read into that first before you get much further into hacking. Most of Kali’s toys are based off of the terminal, so in order to run them, you will be typing commands like “nmap -A http://your-ip-address”. This link is Offensive Security’s website where they have some awesome documentation about what’s available on Kali.

Everyone wants to break into their neighbors wifi or steal someones password at Starbucks, but depending on National, State, and local law, even packet sniffing could be illegal. So how do we safely practice how to hack before we are ready to find Sony’s back door? We set up a environment for virtual machines on our local computer or server! For those of you who don’t know what a Virtual Machine is, it’s a “computer” inside your computer.