Whether you're evaluating a new vulnerability assessment tool, or looking to hone your application hacking skills, the Hacme Bank application by FoundStone, Inc offers a perfect "victim" for you to use as a testing target. Hacme Bank simulates an online banking website with the added bonus of having numerous vulnerabilities purposely designed in for you to discover.

In this write-up I'll walk you through the necessary steps for getting the application up and running on a Windows XP Professional VMWare image. I prefer this setup for a couple of reasons. First, if an unrecoverable error condition occurs (while hurling malicious packets at the application perhaps?) you can simply revert the Virtual Machine back to a known good state. Second, by positioning Hacme Back on an isolated machine I'm able to use my everyday penetration testing rig as the attack platform.

This is a continuation of my collection of articles pertaining to dual-booting Leopard and Kubuntu on a MacBook Pro. This article is just a quick rundown of the software packages that are always installed on my laptop.

Awhile back I wrote about adding custom tags to the Markdown Plugin in which I created two new custom tags, a "Note" and a "Warning" block. This time around I'm adding an additional custom Markdown tag which is an "Update" tag for when you want to signify that a portion of a previously published article has been altered.

In this article I'll be tinkering with one of Movable Types default plugins, John Gruber's Markdown, which is one of the text formatting choices available when working in the Entry Editor.

The brilliance of Markdown comes from it's powerful translations, combined with it's utter ease of use. Granted, it's not your typical WYSIWYG and did pose a slight comfort curve (the time and effort it takes to adjust to a new way of editing; for me at least!), but after writing only three articles with it I'm hooked!

Due to the recent growing popularity of dual-booting the MacBook Pro I decided to move the Kubuntu portion of my Leopard and Kubuntu on a MacBook Pro article into it's own entry. My hope is to find the time to tweak this article enough so it provides a thorough, step-by-step walk-through that others can use.

Thanks to a fun personality quirk of mine I find myself re-imaging my MacBook Pro on a regular basis, so I figured documenting the process would be a brilliant idea. The goal is actually twofold: to streamline the process for myself and to provide a baseline for folks attempting to re-create any of my experiments on their own MBPs.

The directions which follow apply to my dual boot MacBook Pro, your mileage may vary...