Setting Up the Environment

Hello, world. I’m Zanidd. And welcome back to the Hands On Password Cracking and Security course. In this video, I will show you how to set up the environment for the rest of the course. First of all, make sure you have enough power, memory, and storage on your machine. Otherwise, you won’t have enough disc space for the rainbow tables, VMs, and not enough power to power up the VM. You can do it with four cores and 4 gigabytes of RAM. But it will be extremely slow. Especially the cracking, which needs a lot of power, will be extremely slow. And you can go download and install the VirtualBox software, which you can find on virtualbox.org.

They also have guides on how to install them on different OSs. And after you’re done with that, you can continue this video and we can download and install the Kali VM together, then clone the git repository with hackable passwords. And we’re ready to crack our first password.

You can download the Kali Linux images from their official website, which is kali.org/downloads. Once you have downloaded the ISO file, you can create a new machine virtual box. Name it Kali.

Choose Linux.

And it doesn’t really matter what we pick here. But I think we’re going to go with Ubuntu. Go on to the next step. We will give the machine two to six gigs of RAM, depending on your configuration.

I’m giving my machine eight gigabytes of RAM.

Also, we want to create a virtual hard disc, VDI. And give them a fixed size. And the size of this depends if you want to have the rainbow tables in the machine or outside of the machine. I will give it around 30 gigs, because I will have the rainbow tables on my local machine instead of my virtual machine.

Once the machine is created, we can start it up by double-clicking it.

And then it asks us to select a disc.

We will add our Kali ISO as optical disc and choose it.

Once we added the ISO as an optical disc, we will be able to choose it from this list. And click Start, which will start the Kali installation. You can choose whichever installer you want. From here on, you just need to follow the Kali installation.

You can pick the language and click Continue. Select where you’re from, what keymap to use.

And the rest will be done by the installation wizard.

Once the wizard is done with the setup, we can configure our hostname. I’ll just pick Kali for this one, and Continue. Domain name we can leave empty.

Then we can set up a new user, which I will call Zanidd. But you can choose your own username.

And choose a password. Make sure it’s one with a high entropy. Next, we configure the clock, and let the research work again. Once the wizard has found our virtual discs, we can just use guided, use the entire disc. Install, Continue, Continue, Continue. Right, change to disc. Yes and Continue.

If you have a proxy, enter your proxy. If not, just Continue. Then a little bit of more waiting.

On this screen, you can just select all that’s default and Continue.

Pick “Yes” when the group bootloader. Select this only device, Continue.

Once the installation is done, you can log in with the credentials that you set in the installation.

After the installation, reboot the machine and login with the credentials that you set during the installation. Open a terminal and make a directory with mkdir, and call it “Passwords”.

Changing to that directory with cd.

Then clone the repository from the course page into this directory, and you should have some password files.

And that’s it for this setup In the next video, we will crack our first password. See you next time.