HACKER WARS
Jonni Bidwell takes you through the world of hacking, and shows you how to set up your own system to hack.
We have a funny relationship with the word ‘hacker’ here at LXF Towers. On the one hand, anyone that’s ever fiddled with Linux or meddled with Arduino (or even exited Vim successfully) has, as far as we’re concerned, earned the right to call themselves a hacker. The mainstream media, and indeed our beloved management bods, have other ideas. They would have it that a hacker is a morally bankrupt criminal, intent on misusing technology to foment chaos, steal people’s savings and commit fraud.
Certainly there are people that do those things (hedge funds?–ed), but there are also people (‘white-hat hackers’) that use the same techniques to help people bolster their defences or even recover from an electronic intrusion. Companies invest significant sums paying individuals to penetration-test their networks and socially engineer their employees.
At any rate, the idea that programs can be made to misbehave is a fascinating one, and not just from the potential of someone wanting to cause harm (which we know LXF readers absolutely do not). So join us on this journey as we find out how systems are compromised, how to prevent it and how to have fun along the way. We’ll set up your very own virtual machine that you can, perfectly legally, hack to your heart’s content.
All the tools we’ll make use of in this feature are available on any Linux distro, but we’ve chosen Kali Linux (which you’ll find on the LXFDVD) as our platform of choice this time around. We will show you how to install Metasploit, scan for vulnerable services, craft exploits and launch attacks. It’s pretty exciting, even if we do say so ourselves.
Management will be quaking in their boots that our gobbledegook magazine has really gone too far this time. But don’t worry, we won’t get into any trouble if you don’t. So just obey common sense, please. We might teach you how things can be broken here, but we don’t teach you how to cover your tracks.