The sys admin's daily grind – Metasploitable

Gone to the Dogs

Article from Issue 172/2015
Author(s):

If you mess around with a pen-testing tool on your own network, you might survive the consequences, but chances are you'll take the prize for outstanding recklessness. Charly has some advice: Use Metasploitable, perhaps the most broken Linux ever.

You've probably heard of the Darwin Awards [1]. This hilarious prize goes to people who improve the quality of the human gene pool by removing their own genes in an outstandingly stupid way. Because of this, almost all Darwin Awards are awarded posthumously – the few exceptions are unappetizing and don't make good family reading material [2].

My favorite award went to two gentlemen who took their off-road vehicle onto a frozen lake to indulge in a spot of dynamite fishing. One of the men set fire to an explosive charge and threw it far away. The men were a bit shocked when their dog cleverly retrieved the dangerous stick.

Given this emergency, they pulled out guns to stop the dog, which promptly hid under the SUV for safety. Needless to say, the dynamite detonated, the car sank, and the blast blew away the clever owners. They lost consciousness and were later found frozen to death. Pity about the dog – respect for the forensic scientist who reconstructed the sequence.

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • Charly’s Column: w3af

    After toiling away to create a small but exclusive website, Charly wanted to run a security scanner against it to check for vulnerabilities. The choice of tools is enormous, but Charly chose w3af.

  • Security Lessons

    When it comes to security, public disclosure of vulnerabilities and working exploit code is now common. We look at why this can be both harmful and helpful to securing your systems.

  • Charly's Column – The Fuck

    In the 25 years of Linux kernel history, a huge amount of code and many comments have accumulated. They can be explanatory, enlightening, funny, or even profane. Charly prefers to do things differently, so he types fuck in the shell.

  • Charly’s Column: PortSentry

    To celebrate 10 years of his column, Charly sets up a sensitive detector that measures the cosmic background radiation of the Internet.

  • IPv6 Pen Testing

    If you have enabled IPv6 on your network without considering basic security issues, you might have opened up a hole for attackers. In this article, we demonstrate a successful attack on a server via IPv6 and explain how the popular security tools handle IPv6.

comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News