The Hacker Academy from a student’s perspective- The set up
November 16, 2011
Today, I finally got to dig into the very first module at The Hacker Academy. I was excited to dig into the material and find my way around. The first module is appropriately titled “Introduction to The Hacker Academy” and an accompanying lab for setting up your home environment.
As I watched the introduction video I was glad to see that there would be a strong focus on penetration testing. And not just “run this command, now this command, and now this command”, but the actual mindset that it takes to conduct a great penetration test. Penetration testing is a field I want to get into, but unfortunately I was never sure how. Now I feel like through lessons learned at The Hacker Academy, I will be that much closer to getting into my dream job.
After I finished watching the video I started the lab, “Set Up Your Environment”. I read through the steps and thought to myself a few things:
1) This shouldn’t take long. Looks like I just download VirtualBox and a VM and verify the VM runs correctly. (Yeah, jinxed myself).
2) I get to learn VirtualBox, which is a virtualization technology I have never touched. So I get to learn a new tool. Cool.
3) It became readily apparent that Backtrack 5 would be the primary tool of use for my labs. I have very limited experience with Backtrack, so I’m definitely looking forward to becoming a master of Backtrack.
If you have any experience working in IT, you should know that no matter how simple something is there is always the chance that something will go wrong. I was quickly reminded of this fact.
Setting up VirtualBox was a breeze. Your typical “Next>>Next>>Finish” type of install. I downloaded The Hacker Academy’s Backtrack 5 VM as well and added it to the VirtualBox repository of VMs. I then started up the VM and was prompted with “hd0 read failure” and thrown into a “grub rescue” terminal.
Great. So much for this being easy.
I did the typical troubleshooting steps. Restarting VirtualBox, restarting my computer, running VirtualBox as an administrator, removing the VM from VirtualBox and readding it, etc. etc.
The fix ended up being simple: Downloading the VM again and extracting it to a new folder and not the folder that is created by Windows using the same name as the archive. After that it was easy, Backtrack booted right up and I confirmed the correct IP address was assigned to eth0 and startx ran properly.
Murphy’s Law is always fun to deal with. But at least it’s a great teacher. Looking forward to what unique challenges I’ll deal with in the next module.
-Kevin
