Job Interview

So the job market sucks. No big news there; But even though the market is in the (blank) you need to be careful when interviewing. I am going to cover a few important points that will not only help you with the interview but also ensure you find a job you will be happy with.

Now let me say you may need to settle for a lower pay rate or work with is not really in your ideal but you should not find yourself in the "Bait and Switch" position.

Now what follows are recommendations and not rules.

1. Ask to get your job function in writing now this may not be super detailed but should be fairly accurate. 
2. Ask to speak to your perspective co-workers without the manager present. THIS IS CRITICAL. You may learn things which will affect you decision.
1. What are their qualifications for the position they are in? (Education, time on job etc.)
2. Who was in the position before you and what happened to them?
3. Why are they hiring (was the last person fired or left?)
4. How are they on lunch (1/2 hour 1 hour)
5. if you work late one day can you come in late the following day.
6. Do people leave right at the end of there time or do they put in extra time?
7. Look at their desks and body language. 
3. If the manger says you CANNOT speak to your perspective co-workers then say thank you and walk away. Think about it what are they trying to hide?!
4. Get everything: salary, vacation days etc. in WRITING! 
5. NEVER MAKE A DECISION ON THE SPOT! Think it over and consider all expenses etc. 

Feel free to post your experiences. 

Good Luck in your search.

Oracle Virtual Box and Backtrack 5 R3

So you want to work with BackTrack 5 R3 and you either do not have spare computers (try eBay) or maybe you just want some additional portability in testing.

There can be numerous reasons for going virtual, now I can not tell that this is better then a physical lab. I am old school and will take physical systems over going VM (Virtual Machine) any day. But this is purely a personal preference and arguably produces better testing (but I can already see some people saying "I don't think so...". That said this posting is all about introducing VM and how to install BackTrack under VM.

The best option our there today is hands down Oracles Virtual Box, and it is FREE. Will not cost you one cent and it is fairly easy to use and configure. I would suggest that if you are interested download it and play with it more then the basic levels which I will be covering in this tutorial.

As a side note want to be a good Ethical Hacker Security person, learn to master the Art of Free security software. Why the Black Hat Hackers are very good at it and you will need to learn to fight fire with fire. Thus lets move forward.

First off you need to download virtual box.

Search Google for Oracle Virtual Box

First off go to Google (or any preferred search engine), no I do not get any commission for promoting Chrome. (I wish I did..hint...hint....Google if you are reading this.)

Search for Virtual Box.

Virtual Box Web Site

You should now see this page or something very similar.

On the right hand side there is download.

Choose the version of the OS that you are using.
You may also want to select the Virtualbox 4.1.20 Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack It offers support for USB 2.0 which may be helpful. In may case I use a Ultra Book as one of my laptops and it has no internal DVD so the USB 2.0 support was beneficial.

On a side note Ultra Books are AWESOME, SSD are great. Once you go SSD you will never want to go back.

Once you double click the installer you will be presented with this screen.

Once you push next you will see this screen.  You can leave the defaults if you want to.

Next you choose next.

This is the network interface warning screen. The reason you are seeing this is that in VM you can have multiple network interfaces available to you VM..

In this screen choose Yes

Now choose Install

Now one should see this screen.

Progress working...

Now choose finish, make sure the check box to Start Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.1.20 after installation is selected.

You should now see the default VirtualBox.
Choose New from the menu on the top.

Once you choose new you should see this screen. Now push Next.

This is the default screen you will need to make some changes.

In the name field, you can choose any name you want. Now I from habit stick to no space names.

Also make sure you set the:
Operating System: Linux
Version: Linux 2.6 (32-Bit or 64-Bit) 
//this will vary based on your system. 

Next you need to choose how much ram you want to allocate for you virtual systems. My advice is go to the task manager (right click the windows bar and choose task manager) Then select Performance to see the Ram usage. From here you can determine how much free ram you can allocate. Do note not to allocate all your remaining ram (leave some fudge ram for the system and other programs.

In this screen choose Create new hard disk.

Choose VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image)

Now here the default is Dynamically allocated. You will want to change this. Primarily due to the fact that even though it sounds great (which it does) it has one tiny problem...IT DOES NOT RELEASE SPACE ONCE ALLOCATED!. Opps Oracle!

So you will want to change this.

So as said above you will want to go with fixed size and press Next.

In his case I have set it to 30 GB  you can set it to what you wish. I would recommend  a minimum of 8 GB.



Now you will see the summary screen and choose Create.

Progress bar...(oh joy...time will var depending on your drive....blah blah blah...you get the idea)

Ok it's not an animated Gif but you get the idea. :) SSD to...compare with standard. 

Once complete you will now see this screen. 

Next choose Settings

This is the default settings screen.

This is the network screen and adapter one will default to NAT. Which is fine for this case. 
Oracles explanation is:

"When you first create a virtual machine, VirtualBox by default enables one virtual network card and selects the "Network Address Translation" (NAT) mode for it. This way the guest can connect to the outside world using the host's networking and the outside world can connect to services on the guest which you choose to make visible outside of the virtual machine.

This default setup is good for probably 95% of VirtualBox users. However, VirtualBox is extremely flexible in how it can virtualize networking. It supports many virtual network cards per virtual machine, the first four of which can be configured in detail in the Manager window. Additional network cards can be configured on the command line with VBoxManage."

To learn more goto: http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch06.html

Now look you are going to be testing with BackTrack which can lead to "Incidents" inadvertently happening. So BE CAREFUL! 

You can set the adapter 2 etc to a real network adapter in your computer...

ON this screen you can choose OK.

You can choose "Do not show this message again"

Next you will need to install BackTrack to do this we are going to walk through the DVD method because this is a the most common and if you need to is the best way to install it fully on a system.

In this example we are using the D drive which is the default External DVD for this computer.

You should then see this summary screen.

You should then see the VirtualBox splash screen.

You will then see this blank screen (Don't Worry)

In a fe seconds you should see this screen.
From here just press Enter.

You will then see this Start Up Screen choose option 1 (the default).
Press Enter

You will then see this screen as the install begins

You may get this pop upp window depending on your display driver. You can just select Do Not Show this Message Again and press OK

I do not know why this came up for me seeing how the system is running at 32 Bit color.

You will then see this screen

You will then see this prompt.

Type Startx  This will start x-Windows

Double lclick the Install BackTrack icon (shown on the top left corner)

This will start the install process
Just Press Forward

Choose you time zone.

You can click on the map or us the pull down menu (showing Chicago)

Here you need to choose you keyboard. You can use the empty box area to test your keyboard settings. Usually you can keep the default. 

OK now here is where sometimes it seems a bit scary. The whole "Erase and use entire disk" part. But do not worry you are in a VIRTUAL environment. Now here I also need to point out one "documentation" mistake I made you see I did not have time to create this tutorial in one sitting. So you will notice my drive suddenly lost 10 GB. The HD is 21.5 GB this is due to me setting a smaller drive side.

Anyhow just use the option shown and DO NOT WORRY, this will NOT fry your whole drive just the VM one.

 
This is the final screen before the install. 
Press Install

Now you will see this progress bar.
WARNING: this is REALLY slow process (as in many minutes to hours). Remember this is VM so it takes longer to do the initial install.

Well thats it, once complete you can launch VirtualBox and then choose your BackTrack 5 R3. 
Look at older posts for more tutorials. 

As always have fun and keep it legal.