Purple Purple Purple

Today, I wiped my PC and installed Kali Purple as my main OS to primarily focus on my learning and cybersecurity offensive pentesting. In case you’re not aware, Kali is a Debian based Linux distro which focuses on cybersecurity tool sets/packages for penetration testing and with the introduction of Kali ‘Purple’, defensive and offensive tool suites are pre-installed making this a beautiful masterpiece!

(…just looking at the desktop makes me smile…)

Today’s HTB challenge was a Tier 2 box called Vaccine! (We won’t talk about what that word means to many today…*coughs*) This box provided fundamental instructions on learning various tools such as:

john: “John the Ripper is an Open Source password security auditing and password recovery tool available for many operating systems.”

sqlmap: “sqlmap is an open source penetration testing tool that automates the process of detecting and exploiting SQL injection flaws and taking over of database servers.”

netcat: “A simple Unix utility which reads and writes data across network connections using TCP or UDP protocol. It is designed to be a reliable “back-end” tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts.”

hashid: “hashID is a tool written in Python 3.x which supports the identification of over 175 unique hash types using regular expressions. It is able to identify a single hash or parse a file and identify the hashes within it. There is also a nodejs version of hashID available which is easily set up to provide online hash identification.”

hashcat: “World’s fastest password cracker. Hashcat supports five unique modes of attack for over 300 highly-optimized hashing algorithms.”

Ultimately, we went through the walk-thru (honestly had to stop a few times to re-read some instructions and do some personal research but then got back on track) took some awesome notes, and added these to our repertoire of future attack / discovery methods.