Workspace
LinuxPermalink
I spend quite some time in my laptop because I am running Linux mint 20. I quit Windows last year, after it messed up my disk encryption I was so fed up, I installed Linux mint. I was already using Linux a lot during my internship, so it wasn’t that big of a step. Nor have I regretted it ever since. There where a few set-backs along the way, but I will describe my journey here.
DistributionPermalink
The first problem with installing Linux is choosing a distribution. I wanted something beginner-friendly and commonly used. This brought me to the most used distro: Ubuntu. This is a great and simple distro, Debian based which is great, because most of my experience with Linux came from Kali (also Debian based). Then a co-worker at HackDefense recommended Linux Mint. Mint Cinnamon to be exact, has an interface that is more like Windows’, which I really like. Mint is based on Ubuntu, so it is very similar. Some parts are different, but almost all troubleshooting for Ubuntu works. I choose for mint, after all, I had nothing to lose. It was a great decision, that I never regretted. Cinnamon is the desktop environment for Mint, this means that it handles almost all of the visual aspects of Mint. There are other variants of Mint, but Cinnamon is the most popular and just very good.
RicingPermalink
Ricing is the art of ‘pimping’ your Linux Distribution. The term came from people who bought cheap Asian sport-cars and made then look faster than they were. Ricing takes a lot of work and time, so I haven’t done full rice, but I am happy with the results.
I wanted everything to match my background picture, so I started by finding a cool background. This will do great:
Then, I look for a program that could get the colour scheme of my background. for this I found Pywal(https://github.com/dylanaraps/pywal). Pywal is a simple program that exports a bash colour scheme based on your desktop background.
Then I got to the system itself. I found that there is a CSS file that colours the system. I decided to edit this file to change the look of everything. It took me a while to understand the undocumented file, but the result was very nice. Unfortunately, I lost this file, so I cannot show my results.
ZSHPermalink
Linux’ bash is great, but it can be better, that’s why I installed ZSH with Oh-My-ZSH (https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh) and the powerlevel10k theme. This, combined with multiple plugins gives me a fast and easy shell, allowing me to do tasks very quickly.
I have the following plugings installed in ZSH:
- safe-paste: This simple plugin makes sure that your command does not immediately execute after pasting it in the terminal, even if there is a newline at the end, so you can edit the command before executing it.
- docker This enables auto-complete for docker commands, last semester I used a lot of Docker.
- common-aliases Common aliases for your shell, this plugin gives you some extra shortcuts when using the terminal.
- debian This gives you extra aliases and autocompletion for the
apt
environment, making installing programs a bit easier. - pip A small plugin that gives you more autocompletion for python’s pip tool.
- sudo Simple, but I use it a lot. When you press escape twice,
sudo
is added before the current command. If there is no command, it will copy the previous command, but with sudo in front of it. This is useful when you forget that a command requires root. - zsh-syntax-highlighting Add some syntax highlight, to make it easier to understand and review your commands.
- zsh-autosuggestions Suggests commands that you typed earlier, this allows you to re-execute a command without having to do a reverse search or re-type it.
VMwarePermalink
For my tools and machines, I use VMware workstation 16 Pro. This is in my opinion the best client for virtual machines. I like to run the machines locally, since I have a good laptop that can run the Vm’s and schools Seclab tends to be slow and have some problems.
KaliPermalink
My most used VM must be the Kali-Linux VM. This is an install of the latest version of Kali (2020.2) with Xfce
as display manager. I’ve made very little changes to my Kali install, because I often install a new version from scratch when an update comes out. A few small changes are things like setting the panel at the bottom and setting a few shortcuts on the panel. Another change is that I install gobuster
, a faster alternative to dirbuster
or dirb
. As soon as these things are set, I make a snapshot and I am done.
ReverseingPermalink
For the reverse engineering challenges, I started with my Kali, but this proved to be somewhat unconventional, so I installed Remnux
. This is a Ubuntu machine with all Linux based reversing tools installed. Such as Ghidra, Cutter and various checkers. For windows based binaries I have a Windows 10 machine with Ollydbg installed.
Windows 10Permalink
I have only one Windows 10 machine, on here I test payloads, malware and other windows based tests. This is pretty sloppy, since the malware, tools and payloads might collide with each other. But so far I’m good. When the time comes I will install a new Windows 10, or use snapshots the switch between the states.