Hackavision

Recently I bought a gaming computer with some of the best specs out there (i7, gtx670, 16gig ram, ssd, etc) and decided to finally set up my own Pentesting lab so I can practice breaking and securing "real" boxes of my own. My current setup consists of my router connected to my apartment's WAN using DHCP, which issues private DHCP leases to the connected boxes on my network. I have a Windows 7 laptop of my own, a Windows 7 desktop host machine running VMs, and a Ubuntu 12.10 server for all my main Linux needs (I have SSH set up so I can access this box from work and other places). My friends also connect to this network via Wifi, so there are random Win7 and OSx computers connected to it. As for my virtualized boxes, I have Windows XP (different SPs), Windows Server 2003, 2008, and 2012, Metasploitable 2, DVL (Damn Vulnerable Linux), BackTrack5R3 (I hack from this box), and a few other exploitable machines. I will be setting up a Windows Vista and a couple other *nix...

Starting today, I will start releasing how-tos on hacking the Metasploitable distro of Linux released by the creators of Metasploit in which I will go through how to determine if a system is exploitable, how to use Metasploit, how to load modules and run exploits, and what to do once you have exploited a system. I hope these posts, starting with this (#1), teach the readers the important parts of using Metasploit as well as the basics of Pentesting and exploitation. This is by no means a thorough series on exploitation, but a way to get basic users' hands wet in the world of exploitation and hacking.

So we cracked Level 4  with some knowledge of HTTP headers and requests, and used a cool little app to help us out. Now we are on Level 5 , and after logging it it presents us with a weird page: Well wait, didn't we just log in? Why does it say we aren't?

So Level 3  required a bit more knowledge of web servers and how searches parse them, but we got through it and are now on Level 4 . When we load up this level, we are welcomed by the following error: So it can see where we are coming from, and it doesn't like it.

After breaking Level 2  with some knowledge of how web servers hold their data, we move on to Level 3  which presents us with the same page as level 2:

So Level 1  wasn't that bad, either. Let's start Level 2  with the credentials that we found in the previous level. When we load up level 2, we are presented with this: Kind of ironic since there's text, right?

Level 0 was quite easy, for obvious reasons, so lets see if level 1 can be any harder. For this one, right clicking has been blocked, so we can't break it like we did with level 0... or can we?

OverTheWire  has released a new WarGame called "Natas" which focuses on web security, so I thought I'd try my hand at it and give some walkthroughs/how-tos as I beat each level. I'm still a newbie at websec, so deal with me! Going to the front page of Natas , it gives us the creds to get into level 0, so we need to find level 1's creds somehow.

 Since I've explained now how to get Backtrack 5, if you're still not on Linux then go install it now before all the fun stuff starts! As for today's post I'll be explaining an important part about netsec: Address Resolution Protocol. Understanding ARP, or Address Resolution Protocol, is a key part in understanding how networks communicate.