Blog
News and updates from OffSec

Jan 4, 2016
What it means to be an OSCP
When a student earns an Offensive Security certification such as the OSCP, it is a testament to the personal investment they have made as part of a commitment to excellence. Like getting a degree from a university, no matter what happens in your life from that point forward, the fact is your earned that certification and it is yours to keep. Saying this, there are some hard truths behind the path to OSCP.
Categories

Kali Linux
MASSCAN Web Interface
A couple of weeks ago, we had the opportunity to scan and map a large IP address space covering just over 3 million hosts. Our tool of choice for this was the fast and capable masscan, which is packaged in Kali. While masscan has several convenient output formats, such as binary and XML, one feature we were missing was an easy way to search our results. We quickly whipped up a little web interface that would allow us to import and search within a masscan XML output file. This feature proved very useful for us – as once we identified a specific vulnerable pattern on a machine, we could easily cross reference this pattern with over the millions of discovered hosts in our database.
Dec 4, 2015
3 min read

Kali Linux
Kali Linux 2.0 Top 10 Post Install Tips
With Kali 2.0 now released, we wanted to share a few post install procedures we find ourselves repeating over and over, in the hopes that you will find them useful as well. We’ve also slapped in some answers to common questions we’ve been getting. Here is our top 10 list:
Aug 12, 2015
3 min read

Kali Linux
Kali 2.0 Dojo Black Hat / DEF CON USA 2015
Last years event was a rousing success, with many attendees staying all day long and working through the multiple exercises. We had such a great time, we wanted to do it again. This is a great chance to get hands on with Kali 2.0, learning the cutting edge features and how to best put them to use. In this two session workshop series, we will be covering how to create your own custom Kali ISO that is tweaked and modified to exactly fit your needs. This will be followed up in the second session with a hands-on exercise of deploying Kali on USB sticks so that it contains several persistent storage profiles, both regular and encrypted – including the LUKS nuke feature.
Jun 8, 2015
3 min read

OffSec News
What’s New with Exploit Database?
New Features in the Exploit Database Over the past 6 years, we have been maintaining and updating the Exploit Database on a daily basis, which now boasts over 35,000 exploits. While we constantly work on improving our back-end and entry quality. Over the years there haven’t really been any updates to the front-end, which has
May 13, 2015
3 min read

Kali Linux
Booting Kali Linux Live Over HTTP
Kali Linux Features Here at Offensive Security, we tend to use Kali Linux in unconventional ways – often making use of some really amazing features that Kali Linux has to offer. One of these interesting use-cases includes booting instances of Kali Linux Live over HTTP, directly to RAM. We realized there’s little documentation around this
May 11, 2015
2 min read

Kali NetHunter
NetHunter 1.2 – Lollipop & Nexus 6/9
Kali NetHunter 1.2 Released! Kali NetHunter 1.2 is fresh out, with a whole bunch of improvements, bug fixes….and yes, Android Lollipop support. This means that NetHunter now supports the Nexus6 and Nexus 9 devices too! This is awesome news to all those who have bought these new Nexus devices and have yearned to install the
May 11, 2015
3 min read

Kali Linux
Kali Linux on a Raspberry Pi (A/B+/2) with Disk Encryption
With the advent of smaller, faster ARM hardware such as the new Raspberry Pi 2 (which now has a Kali image built for it), we’ve been seeing more and more use of these small devices as “throw-away hackboxes“. While this might be a new and novel technology, there’s one major drawback to this concept – and that is the confidentiality of the data stored on the device itself. Most of the setups we’ve seen do little to protect the sensitive information saved on the SD cards of these little computers.
Mar 9, 2015
7 min read

Insights
OffSec InfoSec Certifications in the Job Market
A couple of weeks ago we published our comic Try Harder song, praising the OSCP certification and our students in general. It was really well received by our alumni, who related closely to the theme of “Try Harder“. However, there is a more serious undertone to this than meets the eye. Information Security Certifications Mean Little
Feb 2, 2015
3 min read

Kali Linux
Kali USB – Multiple Persistent Stores
One of the markings of the 1.0.7 Kali release was the introduction of Kali Live USB LUKS encrypted persistent storage, on which we further elaborated in one of our previous blog posts. However, we’re not done yet with USB persistent storage as more features in Kali remain to be explored.
Jan 27, 2015
4 min read

OffSec News
Offensive Security Say – Try Harder!
Offsec students go through hell. They endure levels of stress and frustration beyond what is considered normal, and we at Offsec appreciate this. So much in fact, that we’ve dedicated the following song to anyone who’s taken an Offsec course, and tried harder!
Jan 19, 2015
3 min read

Kali NetHunter
NetHunter 1.1 Released
With the opening shots of 2015 fired, we are happy to make some announcements in the NetHunter arena! One of the things that excite us the most about Kali Linux is how our Kali projects always end up being greater than the sum of their parts. This is most evident in our Kali NetHunter Project – the first open source Android based penetration testing platform for Nexus and OnePlus devices. Wait, OnePlus phones? Yes! Our new NetHunter v1.1 release brings with it some great news – and so we begin.
Jan 5, 2015
4 min read

OffSec News
Happy Holidays from Offsec
We at Offensive Security would like to thank all of our students, customers, and friends for a wonderful 2014. Its been a busy but productive year, with major upgrades to Kali Linux, the release of Kali NetHunter, the public launch of the hosted virtual labs, the first ever Kali Linux Dojo, upgrades to our student labs, lots of interesting R&D, a bunch of 0-days and a number of other accomplishments. We enjoyed the journey with all of you and here is to a fun and productive 2015! We wanted to thank you with this video we produced for all y’all.
Dec 22, 2014
1 min read
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