Published Article in Pentestmag.com - Pentesting: The Open Source and Manual Way

Second security article related to penetration testing/hacking published in Pentestmag.com. Due to author-magazine agreement, i could not upload the whole content of my published article. Only subscribed users can download the whole magazine.

Links to the magazine: 

http://pentestmag.com/special-starterkit-pack/

http://pentestmag.com/become-well-known-pentester-today-pentest-starterkit-032013/

The focus of this article is to demonstrate on how to perform a pentest using open source and manual methods rather than using automated tools such as Qualys or Nessus. It also elaborates on the reason why performing the manual way provides a better and deeper understanding of the system and vulnerabilities associated with the services/applications found during the recon and scanning phase.

The Cover Page

The Table of Contents

The First Page of my Article

The Final Page of my Article

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Getting started - Installing BackTrack5r3 on VMware Workstation 8.

In the previous tutorial, we run our BackTrack on VMware. Now we want to install it on VMware so that we dont have to run it on the .iso file and able to create files and folders on it.

Run your BackTrack VM and log in to the account. On the desktop, click on 'Install BackTrack'

Choose your preferred language and click Forward

Choose your region and click Forward

Choose your Keyboard layout and click Forward

By default, BackTrack will use all available disk allocated during the setup. Click Forward

Click Install

Installation will take between 20mins to 40mins.

Once completed, click Restart Now

Click Enter

The VM will reboot and once you login to your account and run the #startx, you will get your GUI. You can further test your installation by removing the .iso from the VM settings and start it to see if BackTrack can run without the .iso file.

Cheers. :)

Getting started - Running BackTrack5r3 on VMware Workstation 8.

First and foremost, let's download the .iso file from the main website to our host machine.

http://www.backtrack-linux.org/backtrack/backtrack-5-r3-released/

Once downloaded, start up our VMware workstation and click on File > New Virtual Machine

Click Next for the Typical setup

Browse to the .iso file that we downloaded just now and click Next

Choose Linux and since BackTrack 5 runs in Ubuntu, we shall choose Ubuntu as the version.

Give a name to our Virtual machine and choose the location on where the files should reside then click Next

Choose the size we want to allocate for our Virtual Machine. *Its better to allocate more space for it as later we are going to install it so that it will not run from the .iso file anymore.

Check the settings and click Finish

Click Enter

Choose the first option

The default login is 'root' and the default password is 'toor'

Once username and password is entered, type #startx

BackTrack will now load into its GUI

There.... you have now successfully launched BackTrack5r3 on your virtual machine. Next tutorial will be on how to install BackTrack into the VM so that we do not have to run it using the .iso file.