Enable WICD at startup on Backtrack 5 R3

Open the main Backtrack menu and select:

System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications

Select Add and in the Command field, enter wicd-gtk.
(wicd-client will also work)

The Name and Comment fields are self-explanatory.

Logout and Log back in. The WICD applet should be present on your task bar. This is all that should be necessary to enable WICD automatically in a desktop environment, but you can follow these steps to have the WICD daemon start at boot time. This will make WICD available automatically at the command line, and speed up the process of having WICD perform an automatic connection when logging in to the desktop. At the command line, enter this:

dpkg-reconfigure wicd && update-rc.d wicd defaults

You should see ouput similar to:

 Adding system startup for /etc/init.d/wicd ...
   /etc/rc0.d/K20wicd -> ../init.d/wicd
   /etc/rc1.d/K20wicd -> ../init.d/wicd
   /etc/rc6.d/K20wicd -> ../init.d/wicd
   /etc/rc2.d/S20wicd -> ../init.d/wicd
   /etc/rc3.d/S20wicd -> ../init.d/wicd
   /etc/rc4.d/S20wicd -> ../init.d/wicd
   /etc/rc5.d/S20wicd -> ../init.d/wicd

dpkg-reconfigure wicd && shouldn’t really be necessary, but it may help with some older installations, and shouldn’t hurt anything otherwise. A good example of what update.rc is doing can be found here: http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-managing-services-with-update-rc-d/

Reboot your system and WICD should now be enabled at the command line, and once you login to your desktop. Please feel free to ask for help in the comments section or by email via the Contact link at the top of the page.

Monitor Wireless Access Points with a One Line Shell Script

This is a quick and dirty one line shell script we wrote for monitoring wireless access points in real time. We wrote this script for getting pertinent information such as BSSIDs, ESSIDs and channel numbers that we use for performing penetration tests on wireless networks. Here’s a screenshot of what the program output looks like:

Install OpenVAS on Ubuntu 10.04

OpenVAS (Open Vulnerability Assessment System) is an excellent suite of tools for penetration testing and security auditing. We here at LOSST are gearing up for an in-depth tutorial on using OpenVAS but, as it often happens, we ran into a small installation issue. So, before we get to the actual usage of OpenVAS, we thought we’d share a helpful installation tip with our readers and hopefully, help save you the wasted time and headaches we experienced ourselves.