Transcript for:
Prerequisites for Penetration Testing Course

Hello everybody, and welcome to this tutorial. Today I will be talking about some of the prerequisites that you will require if you want to follow this course through. One of the first things that you need to be familiarized with is your working environment.

So for myself, I have chosen to use two Linux distros. One will be Fedora 20, which is the operating system that I am using. anyway. And also, I will install a virtual machine.

That virtual machine will be Kali Linux. Basically, it is a Linux distro which contains a great deal of pentesting tools. So it's very useful in that sense.

Don't worry about it, I will explain this process in great detail, how you can set the virtual machine up, how you can install it, and so on and so forth. However, should you be using Windows, that is definitely not advisable for this kind of activity. Primarily because you will, I mean, since I'm doing this in an environment that I own, it doesn't really matter to me if I'm anonymous or not, but in the real world, all the pen testing that is done in the real world, you're always trying to anonymize yourself, you're trying to be as invisible as possible, as As much as possible, you do not want them to figure out where the attack is coming from, or anything of a kind.

You want to wipe your trail, or something of a kind, and Windows is really not good for those sort of things. So there your anonymity level will be very low, and most of the tools that we're going to be using, they are native to the Linux environment. They were made for Linux. So, some of them might not work under Windows.

I have not tested them all out, but most of them will. So you can still use Windows if you like, because I mean you're not hiding from anyone, but since I'm recreating the real-life scenario here, I do need to actually use proxies, VPNs, and so on and so forth, just to show you how it is done, how you can do it. Also, for all the Mac users out there, if you're using Mac OS X, it doesn't really matter which version.

Most of the stuff should work like no problems. The procedures are fairly simpler. The command line tools are the same. How you install them differs, but pretty much you will be able to run the same commands as me.

So there shouldn't be any problems there. Your anonymity level with Mac OS X should be relatively good, but still, on Linux you have the greatest anonymity, and you are rather safe in that sense. Other than that, you will also require working internet connection.

And even though all of these attacks that we're going to do today, well most of them, they work much much better if you have an extremely fast internet connection. But some of these attacks are actually conducted from public Wi-Fi's, in real life anyway. We'll just pretend I will set up a wireless access point in my house and load it so that it's similar to the public Wi-Fi, which is very slow. Some of these attacks, as I said, they go over public Wi-Fi's, and as we all know, and as we've all painfully learned, Public Wi-Fi's are not the fastest internet connections out there.

So, primarily because you have a lot of people that are connected to them, and there's a lot of data going through, they're not the safest network site out there either. But as I said, if you want to absolutely anonymize yourself, and that is what some people do, they actually go out and hook up to a public Wi-Fi, or they go to a bar, or something of a kind, and conduct their attacks from there. Now, before they do that, they need to figure out whether the bandwidth of that wi-fi can sustain their attacks. So, they need to minimize it, they need to downsize it, and that is how they become absolutely anonymous.

Anyway, the third thing that you will absolutely need, so these three things, these are the basic requirements. Everything else will pickup on the way. I will show you how to do it, no problems there. But these three things I can't really show you how to, I mean I can, but it's a bit pointless how to go to your ISP and hook it up to the internet, and hook your telephone to the internet, or something of a kind. But in any case, the third prerequisite is a working wireless card.

And when I say working wireless card, Most of the devices have them, pretty much all laptops from 2005 or from 2008 were standardized with wireless cards. If you're using a desktop machine that doesn't have a wireless card, you should, but you don't need to. However, if you want, you won't be able to follow through a portion of this tutorial then. You should go out and buy a USB wireless card, or something of a kind.

They're pretty cheap, I don't know, 10-15 bucks. So they're not that expensive, and you can get them pretty much anywhere. Anyway, as I was saying, what I mean by a functional wireless network card is that it is recognized by your operating system. So if you are using a Linux distro like I am, you need to make sure that this Linux distro, that the kernel of this Linux distro actually has the necessary drivers for the wireless card that you are using at the moment. If you're probably using Atros or Broadcom, Atros should be fine, pretty much Linux kernel support a large amount of Atros devices, if not all of them, in terms of network cards, so that should be fine.

There were some problems with Broadcom, but as far as I'm informed that has been solved, so no big deal there. If you're uncertain how to check whether you your wireless card functions under your Linux distro, well, just try connecting to a Wi-Fi. If you can connect to a Wi-Fi access point, if you can connect, obviously it works. If you can't, it doesn't work.

But don't just hop to a conclusion that it doesn't work. Maybe it's just turned off, or something like that, but do not worry, I will show this in greater detail in the follow-up tutorials where we actually go over the installation process and all of that. Now there are a couple more things which we need to go over before we head over and start the installation. I would just like to go over some basic terms, some basic terminology that you will need in order to be able to follow this course, in order for you to be able to follow the future tutorials. In any case, I bid you farewell, and I thank you for watching!