We worked with SQL nowadays, and we used some SQL Injections in the web browser and in Burp Suit, but what is an SQL Injection by the way? Let’s make a step back and look at the databases and SQL a bit!
Continue reading “A closer look at SQL and SQL Injection”Category: General
General posts about quick thoughts.
How to backup VMWare Workstation Player machines?
The Workstation Player of VMWare is a lightweight and free desktop virtualization hypervisor for non-commercial users. We can learn about virtualization and use it for practicing for free. We can run Windows, Linux and BSD systems on our host machine. The Workstation Player supports Windows and Linux as host for virtualization.
The free solution comes with some limitations. The following technique will let us to take backups or snapshots of our virtual machines. Only use it for personal practice and learning! Business and nonprofit use is considered commercial use!
Continue reading “How to backup VMWare Workstation Player machines?”How to run multiple instances of the same distro in WSL?
Microsoft WSL is a very good technology when we want to run Linux applications on our Windows computer. When we install a distro from the Microsoft Store we can only install one instance of it. But with some work we can have multiple instances of the same distro.
Continue reading “How to run multiple instances of the same distro in WSL?”How to crack passwords with John the Ripper? Password hacking in real practice as an Ethical Hacker!
In the first part of this series we found out a user’s password with Hydra with simply attacking his account via SSH. It is a so called “dictionary attack”, and because of the lack of security measurements we could get into the remote system.
In this exercise we continue our Ethical Hacking journey and we will find a way to get root privileges on the remote machine. This is called privilege escalation.
Important note: cracking passwords in the wild is illegal! Do NOT do it out of the lab, unless you are a penetration tester with a signed contract!
Continue reading “How to crack passwords with John the Ripper? Password hacking in real practice as an Ethical Hacker!”How and why to use software RAID on Linux?
RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It is used for performance, availability and security reasons. Different virtual and physical storage devices can be combined into logical RAID arrays in different configuration levels (like RAID 0 is striping and RAID 1 is mirroring). The array looks like a single device on the computer. RAID is useful when we want to handle a large amount of data. It enhances speed and increases our storage capacity. The possible data loss because of disk failure is mitigated by adding parity disks to our configuration.
Fixing the “Error connecting…” issue in Kali KeX on WSL (updated: 2023. 01. 12.)
Requirements:
- Kali distro is installed
- KeX is installed
- Kali is WSL version 2
- Coffee is ready for consumption
Time to time the Kali desktop on WSL stops working and spits out the following message:
Error connecting to the KeX server.
Please try "kex start" to start the service.
If the server fails to start, please try "kex kill" or restart your WSL2 session and try again.
Of course the “solution” from the error message does not work.
Continue reading “Fixing the “Error connecting…” issue in Kali KeX on WSL (updated: 2023. 01. 12.)”What is LUKS and how to use it? Let’s encrypt our filesystem on Linux!
LUKS stands for Linux Unified Key Setup. It is an encryption specification that was written for Linux systems in 2004. LUKS is used to encrypt block devices and partitions. This encryption helps to keep our data safe in rest.
Basic NMAP commands survival guide
It is just a quick survival guide to NMAP commands without investigating the rabbit hole of live host discovery, port scanning and firewall evasion techniques.
Continue reading “Basic NMAP commands survival guide”How to install a Debian Linux Penetration Testing machine?
There are excellent Linux distributions for Cyber Security professionals like Kali. They ship all the the bells and whistles that is needed for the tasks. If we want to learn how to put together our own Penetration Testing system we can use a fresh Debian Linux box. I created a small setup from the NetInstall iso starting from the defaults.
Continue reading “How to install a Debian Linux Penetration Testing machine?”How to check the accommodation for hidden devices
Here is the winter holiday season and a lot of people travel and use apartments, hotel rooms, AirBNB etc. Hidden cameras and sound recording devices are small and stealthy. There is no way to be 100% sure that our room is not “wired”, but we can look around in the network if we use it and investigate our surroundings.
Continue reading “How to check the accommodation for hidden devices”What is the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and how to use it?
LVM stands for Logical Volume Manager, it is a tool for file system and disk management on Linux. It can work in different ways like allocating whole devices, but the general usage is putting the LVM on a partition. One of the most common System [Engineer|Administrator] and DevOps interview topic is creating and resizing LVM volumes.
Continue reading “What is the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and how to use it?”Understanding the Linux Cron and Crontab
The UNIX/Linux systems have a powerful tool for scheduling tasks while the computer is running. The daemon that is responsible for initiating the tasks (called cronjobs) is called cron, while the tool that lets us edit the configuration is the crontab. Once we understand the basics of cron we can easily master editing the cron files.
Continue reading “Understanding the Linux Cron and Crontab”How to upgrade to Debian Bullseye from Buster in WSL?
If we installed a Debian WSL distro on our computer, there is a chance that in 6-9 months a new release will come out. We want to keep our system updated, so a distribution upgrade should happen in our WSL ecosystem.
Continue reading “How to upgrade to Debian Bullseye from Buster in WSL?”Understanding the Linux file permissions
Linux supports multiple users and groups on the system to log in, create, modify and delete files and folders. System files and folders must be protected from the ordinary users to avoid accidental deletion or modification. Configuration files can contain sensitive data like passwords and certificates. Our home user directory can contain our private secrets as well. In UNIX/Linux there is a permission and owner/group system in place.
Continue reading “Understanding the Linux file permissions”How to backup and restore a distro on WSL?
Backing up and restoring WSL distros are easy! Simply exporting the stopped distro into an archive file works pretty well. The archive can be moved on an external disk or cloud share. Restoring a backup is importing back the generated archive.
Moreover we can add multiple instances of the same distro with exporting then importing it. With this we can have for example three different Debian boxes in WSL.
Continue reading “How to backup and restore a distro on WSL?”
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