Tag: howto

How to backup VMWare Workstation Player machines?

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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!

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How to break in web applications using Burp Suite? Real web hacking in practice as a Penetration Tester!

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The OWASP Top 10 is a standard awareness document that lists the most common weaknesses of modern web applications. Burp Suite will help our application security testing along the Developer Mode of the browser. We will break in to the OWASP Juice Shop, the most modern and sophisticated insecure web shop.

Important note: hacking in the wild is illegal! Do NOT do it out of the lab, unless you are a penetration tester with a signed contract!

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How to crack passwords with John the Ripper? Password hacking in real practice as an Ethical Hacker!

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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!

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How and why to use software RAID on Linux?

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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.

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Fixing the “Error connecting…” issue in Kali KeX on WSL (updated: 2023. 01. 12.)

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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.

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How to check the accommodation for hidden devices

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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.

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What is the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and how to use it?

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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.

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Understanding the Linux Cron and Crontab

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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.

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Understanding the Linux file permissions

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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.

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How to backup and restore a distro on WSL?

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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.

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