Anyone who is inspired to partake in a challenging course such as the Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP), or Licensed Penetration Tester-Master (LPT (Master)), knows that practice makes you a better hacker. Vulnhub is a great resource to find purpose-built virtual machine images to practice on. This image is based on a popular TV show, and we are going to walk through exploiting it together.
In the world of hackers, there are both good and bad. There are also some that are somewhere in-between on the spectrum. When you look at the entire rainbow of hacker hat colors, you will find that there are many variations at work in the modern world of technology.
Over the decades, cybercrime has evolved, branching out into many strains. There are black hat hackers – (the criminally motivated). crackers, (those breaking into systems to steal information), hacktivists, (infiltrators of computer systems to use them as platforms for public movements), and script kiddies, defined by WiseGeek.com as “teenagers who use readily available tools written by experienced hackers to deface websites or break into computer systems, usually done for peer recognition and attention.”
Black hats vs white hats may sound like a spaghetti Western or a Parisian fashion show, but actually they make a clever way to distinguish between criminals who bypass computer systems for nefarious purposes and computer specialists who try to stop them.
Armitage (Metasploit GUI) makes hacking easy. All you need is a vulnerable target and a working exploit in Metasploit. The “Hail Mary” tries all potential exploits against a target, requiring you to know next to nothing about the vulnerabilities or exploits.