Hi All,

I am curious if OS X would be a good platform for hacking. I have noticed Security Tube's Vivek Ramachandran uses the Macintosh platform for his infosec needs. I also find reference to it being quite useful in PTES (http://www.pentest-standard.org/index.php/PTES_Technical_Guidelines#MacOS_X). What are your thoughts?

It seems to be a good idea (obviously huge debate about overpriced hardware with walled garden mentality) but I personally prefer Arch Linux or Debian (still learning though). If you port over Homebrew it will give you all the tools you need (http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/). My goal are to learn some ideas on the "near-perfect" setup/platform for hacking. Thanks again everyone.

To be truly secure, you need to have the incoming/outgoing servers encrypted with SSL (gmail does this), PGP support for your actual messages sent (public/private keys) and all IP and metadata hidden from source of the emails. Thus far, I personally have not found a way to combine all three. Anyone here know how to?

@IFailStuff


Have you ever read The 4-Hour Body? It is extremely awesome and I have been using the nutrition ideas in it and highly recommend the use of thermogenesis.
My hobbies are... BASH coding, Web App Exploitation, Any Recreational Sports, Fighting Styles (BJJ + Krav Maga), Web Design, Photography, Languages, History, OSINT, Debate, Becoming OSCP-Certified, PUA (The Art of Charm/NLP ROCKS), Social Engineering, Lock Picking. I am always looking for more (sexier) hobbies too xD.

@rasenove,


I have it encrypted on a few external drives and whenever I need to sign in - I just decrypt it and sign in. I have all my accounts done like this - except throw away accounts.

Hello All,


I am not sure where this belongs so I will just ask it here: What methods and sources do you use for OSINT? If no one knows what I mean - I mean foot printing targets and doing reconnaissance (before actual network mapping). I use Google Hacking, The Wayback Machine (to grab cached older material), Social Media (Silobreaker, recordedfuture, socialmention, whostalking, kurrently, covert contact, samepoint, etc), ROBTEX, InfoSniper, Maltego, Palantir, Casefile (Paterva) and I am trying to find the source code for a project called Swift River (https://swiftapp.com/welcome). But the site isn't working for me.


Any input will help and I'd love to learn new ways of accomplishing the same end goal - elicit as much information from the Internet as possible about a target. Thanks ;-)

Hello All,


I am looking for a new laptop but am limited for now. The purposes will be university work, penetration testing lab (virtual box + tools) and programming. My question is: Is it better to have a laptop with an Intel i7 and 8GB RAM with an Intel 3000 HD Graphics or to have a i5 4GB/1GB dedicated with nVIDIA 610M or something low like that? I plan on installing Linux right away so I am limited but I will make it work - just looking for some pointers.

@namespace7

Another good example would be games. There are so many games that you just can't get working on linux. And companies wont port their best games to linux because the linux market is so tiny. Also, linux doesn't have decent drivers for many modern video cards. If you read through linux forums you will see countless threads about how people are having problems with getting video cards to work properly. Yes most of those problems have work-arounds, but for a simple guy who is not into tech stuff, even that simple problem might take a lot of time to solve. This problem should go away in a few years though, as manufacturers are starting to take linux more seriously and start making drivers for it.

This is my exact point namespace7, if a manufacturer of hardware (with money) combines A GNU/Linux OS with good hardware that is compatible and has 0 issues (like Apple does) and sells them as one unit - no problems will happen. For games, Steam is already ported to Linux! If someone pushes it, it will become much easier. And the average user doesn't need to learn the terminal or anything - they can make it "more friendly" easily. The only huge issue is time because if this does happen - the programs for Linux will increase.