Saturday, January 21, 2012

Course Review - Am I ready for taking Penetration Testing with BackTrack (PWB)

Please be informed that this course has been renamed to "Penetration Testing with Kali Linux (PWK)"

If you decided to take the course - Penetration Testing with BackTrack (PWB), you are required to make sure your knowledge and hardwares are suitable or not. I am now going to share my experience with you all.

Although this course is an entry-level course of Offensive Security, you are required to have some knowledge of networking (including TCP/IP) and capable of operating Linux and Windows systems in command line.

You are also required to have some knowledge of programming. You are not required to be an elite programmer, but you need to understand what a program is and how to read it as well as understand what it is doing. The involved programming language are perl, c, python and bash shell script.

Using of virtual machine, such as VMWare Player or VirtualBox is required. It is because most of the students of the course running their BackTrack on the virtual machine instead of a dedicated machine. That means, you have at least 2GB of system memory for the host computer and guest machine. At least 1GB RAM for the guest will make you more comfortable.

A reasonable speed of internet connection is required. The lab is running on OpenVPN and your router (if any) should be capable of handling VPN connecting. After you registered to the course, you will have chance to test the VPN connection. If the connection is confirmed fine, you can then make the payment. Otherwise, you are not suitable to take the course and do not make the payment.

I have connecting the VPN over my Galaxy Nexus and/or Nexus One on 3G data connection via wifi share with no problem. Anyway, it all depends on the 3G connection quality.

If you will do your lab access at any place, you are suggested to install the BackTrack on the virtul machine and host it on a laptop. The size of the virtual machine is around 20GB as I find this size is more comfortable.

In addition, it is time. Make sure you have a lot of time to do the course and lab. As this course is very hard and time consuming as well as demanding, make sure your family members understood that you have a little time or have no time with them during the course. Sometimes, I even not sleeping for over 24 hours in order to compromise a box in the lab.

At last, taking care of yourself. Do not get flu or sick during the course. Hope you all enjoy the course as I was.

Course Review : Penetration Testing with BackTrack