In this post I’m going to present some useful resources to learn about penetration testing and where to use exploitation tools and techniques in a safe and legal environment. This list contain a set of deliberately insecure LiveCDs and virtual machines designed to be used as targets for enumeration, web exploitation, password cracking and reverse engineering.
Holynix
Similar to the de-ice Cd’s and pWnOS, holynix is an ubuntu server vmware image that was deliberately built to have security holes for the purposes of penetration testing. More of an obstacle course than a real world example.
http://pynstrom.net/index.php?page=holynix.php
WackoPicko
WackoPicko is a website that contains known vulnerabilities. It was first used for the paper Why Johnny Can’t Pentest: An Analysis of Black-box Web Vulnerability Scanners found: http://cs.ucsb.edu/~adoupe/static/black-box-scanners-dimva2010.pdf
https://github.com/adamdoupe/WackoPicko
De-ICE PenTest LiveCDs
The PenTest LiveCDs are the creation of Thomas Wilhelm, who was transferred to a penetration test team at the company he worked for. Needing to learn as much about penetration testing as quickly as possible, Thomas began looking for both tools and targets. He found a number of tools, but no usable targets to practice against. Eventually, in an attempt to narrow the learning gap, Thomas created PenTest scenarios using LiveCDs.
http://de-ice.net/hackerpedia/index.php/De-ICE.net_PenTest_Disks
Metasploitable
Metasploitable is an Ubuntu 8.04 server install on a VMWare 6.5 image. A number of vulnerable packages are included, including an install of tomcat 5.5 (with weak credentials), distcc, tikiwiki, twiki, and an older mysql.
http://blog.metasploit.com/2010/05/introducing-metasploitable.html
Owaspbwa
Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Broken Web Applications Project, a collection of vulnerable web applications.
http://code.google.com/p/owaspbwa/
Web Security Dojo
A free open-source self-contained training environment for Web Application Security penetration testing. Tools + Targets = Dojo
http://www.mavensecurity.com/web_security_dojo/
Lampsecurity
LAMPSecurity training is designed to be a series of vunlerable virtual machine images along with complementary documentation designed to teach linux,apache,php,mysql security.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lampsecurity/files/
Damn Vulnerable Web App (DVWA)
Damn Vulnerable Web App is a PHP/MySQL web application that is damn vulnerable. Its main goals are to be an aid for security professionals to test their skills and tools in a legal environment, help web developers better understand the processes of securing web applications and aid teachers/students to teach/learn web application security in a class room environment.
http://www.randomstorm.com/dvwa-security-tool.php
Hacking-Lab
This is the Hacking-Lab LiveCD project. It is currently in beta stadium. The live-cd is a standardized client environment for solving our Hacking-Lab wargame challenges from remote.
http://media.hacking-lab.com/largefiles/livecd/v5.39/livecd-iso-image/hl05.39.iso
Moth
Moth is a VMware image with a set of vulnerable Web Applications and scripts, that you may use for:
http://www.bonsai-sec.com/en/research/moth.php
Damn Vulnerable Linux (DVL)
Damn Vulnerable Linux is everything a good Linux distribution isn’t. Its developers have spent hours stuffing it with broken, ill-configured, outdated, and exploitable software that makes it vulnerable to attacks. DVL isn’t built to run on your desktop – it’s a learning tool for security students.
http://www.damnvulnerablelinux.org
pWnOS
pWnOS is on a “VM Image”, that creates a target on which to practice penetration testing; with the “end goal” is to get root. It was designed to practice using exploits, with multiple entry points
http://www.backtrack-linux.org/forums/backtrack-videos/2748-%5Bvideo%5D-attacking-pwnos.html
http://www.krash.in/bond00/pWnOS%20v1.0.zip
Virtual Hacking Lab
A mirror of deliberately insecure applications and old softwares with known vulnerabilities. Used for proof-of-concept /security training/learning purposes. Available in either virtual images or live iso or standalone formats.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualhacking/files/
Badstore
Badstore.net is dedicated to helping you understand how hackers prey on Web application vulnerabilities, and to showing you how to reduce your exposure.
http://www.badstore.net/
Katana
Katana is a portable multi-boot security suite which brings together many of today’s best security distributions and portable applications to run off a single Flash Drive. It includes distributions which focus on Pen-Testing, Auditing, Forensics, System Recovery, Network Analysis, and Malware Removal. Katana also comes with over 100 portable Windows applications; such as Wireshark, Metasploit, NMAP, Cain & Able, and many more.
www.hackfromacave.com/katana.html
HACKXOR [webapp hacking game]
Hackxor is a webapp hacking game where players must locate and exploit vulnerabilities to progress through the story. Think WebGoat but with a plot and a focus on realism&difficulty. Contains XSS, CSRF, SQLi, ReDoS, DOR, command injection, etc
http://hackxor.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/index.pl
BodgeIt Store
is a vulnerable web application which is currently aimed at people who are new to pen testing
https://code.google.com/p/bodgeit/downloads/list
Exploit KB Vulnerability Web App.
This vulnerability web app. was developed by NightRanger. It's good practice to develop a PHP based site from scratch in order to learn the basic of PHP and MySQL and it is a fully functional web site with a content management system based. You can download as a source code package or VMware Image.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/exploitcoilvuln
puzzlemall
PuzzleMall is a vulnerable web application designed for training purposes.
It is prone to a variety of different session puzzle exposures, which can be detected and exploited using different session puzzling sequences.
http://code.google.com/p/puzzlemall/