Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing Guide

Locating Certain Files inside BackTrack
Let’s say we are searching for “TheHarvester” tool and we don’t know in which directory it exists. 
We can use the locate command to find it.
Example
locate harvester
Text Editors inside BackTrack
BackTrack by default does not have any fancy text editors like Notepad in Windows. It has some 
text editors that we can use within the command line such as nano, pico, and vim.
However, if you want to use a text editor that is equivalent to Notepad in Windows, I would 
recommend you use kate or gedit.

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In order to install them, you would need to issue the following commands from the command 
line:
apt-get install gedit
apt-get install kate
These commands will automatically search the Internet and download the packages and 
dependencies.
Getting to Know Your Network
The first thing that we need to check when we are on BackTrack is that if we have a valid IP 
address. If you type the command “ifconfig” in your command line, it will list all of your current 
configurations.
As you can see from the screenshot, the local IP is 192.168.75.130 and the subnet mask is 
255.255.255.0; you can also see other configurations including network interfaces.
Dhclient
By running the command Dhclient followed by the interface on the terminal, a new static IP 
address will automatically be assigned by DHCP. However, if for any reason this method does not 
work for you, you can start networking by issuing the following command:
root@bt:~# /etc/init.d/networking start

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Services
BackTrack has a variety of useful services such as Apache and MySQL that are disabled by default. 
You can enable these services by issuing various commands on your console.
Note
: Before starting any services such as SSH, you should consider changing your root pass-
word, which is “toor” by default to prevent hackers and other unscrupulous people to get into your 
network.
MySQL
By default the MySQL service runs in your BackTrack 5 OS. You can easily start or stop the ser-
vice by issuing the following init.d script:
Start—/etc/init.d/mysql start
Stop—/etc/init.d/mysql stop
SSHD
SSH functions the same way as the FTP protocol. However, it is used for secure file sharing as 
the data being sent and received is encrypted. So it’s considered more secure than ftp. However, 
weaknesses have also been identified in SSHD clients though it’s relatively more secure than FTP.
In order to start an SSH server, first you need to generate SSH keys. You can generate SSH keys 
by simply issuing the following command in your console.

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Let’s now connect to your SSH server from your Windows operating system. In order to do 
that you would need an SSH client such as putty.
Step 1
—Run the following command in order to start the SSH server on your BackTrack.
/etc/init.d/ssh start
You can verify if SSH is running by typing the following command:
netstat –ano | grep 22
Next, type “ifconfig” from your terminal to obtain your IP address.

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Step 2
—Open up putty on your Windows operating system. Type your BackTrack IP address 
and connect to port 22.
Step 3
—Now it will ask you for your credentials. Enter “root” as username and “toor” as 
password in case you haven’t changed the default credentials.
Step 4
—Once you have entered the credentials, you will be inside the BackTrack console; now 
you can run BackTrack from your Windows.