Goals for 2010: Part 2 – Setup a hack lab and improve pentesting skills
In case you haven’t already caught on, I’m working on fine-tuning my skills and planning for a future career in IT Security. One of the skills I need to continue to improve is penetration testing. For those laymen out there, you would probably use the term “hacking.” Of course, I intend only to use my 1337 h4X0r sk1llz ( that would be read, leet [as in elite] haxor [or hacker] skillz) for good, not for evil.
So, rather than driving down to the local bank and cracking their wireless encryption then gaining access to their servers and looking at people’s personal information, it would be far easier (and way more legal) to setup a hack lab at home with servers and such I can hack away at. So I’ve got a server already that I took to work with me to fill in for awhile, but now that we’ve upgraded our hardware there it is no longer needed and I can use the hardware I bough myself for my own purposes. There are several ways to put together a hack lab, but for simplicity sake I’m starting out by using the resources at http://www.de-ice.net/. De-Ice offers several live linux CD’s with pre-configured hacking challenges on them. So I simply pop the CD into my server, boot it up, and let the leetness begin. Once I’ve obtained my goal, I can move on to the next challenge.
Once I’ve completed all the De-Ice challenges I’ll have to look around for other similar services, if there are any. And if there aren’t, I’ll just have to come up with some of my own scenarios. Meanwhile, there are various online challenges, such as Mod-X I can also conquer.
I hope later in the year to have the time to compete in NetWars and score some points.