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...

Now that I've briefly covered some WEP/WPA cracking, lets install an important tool to our arsenal for issuing exploits and "payloads" (a name for exploits). This program is called "Metasploit" and is considered by many to be one of the most important hacking/pentesting tools around. It has an amazing array of exploits that can be used on many vulnerable machines, and when coupled with the vulnerability scanner Nessus (I'll cover this in the future) becomes a highly sophisticated tool we can use to hack into and secure our networks. I'm installing this on Ubuntu Gnome Backtrack 5 (the newest release), so if you're on a different GUI (like KDE) and aren't using BT5, some things might be different. NOTE: It may be useful for new users to check out my  Linux commands overview that I recently updated (the day this post was released). Hopefully you know the basics of Linux navigation and listing commands, so lets begin.