I’ve been studying an on-line course which requires reverse engineering of some Malware. A virtual environment is ideal for this situation. A new operating system can be created separate from the main operating system, messed around with and then put back exactly as a fresh install relatively easily.
Here is a small guide on installing Backtrack Linux on VirtualBox.
Install VirtualBox
Go to Software Manager, search for VirtualBox and install.
Now VirtualBox is installed, it’s time to get the backtrack operating system. Head over to http://www.backtrack-linux.org/downloads/ and select BackTrack 5 R3, Choose a Window manager, Architecture, Image Type (I went withVM Ware which works in VirtualBox and is what I’ll show below, though mounting an ISO file in VirtualBox and installing from it is straight forward). Finally select your download method.
Open up a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and move into the folder where the file was downloaded. Check the md5sum by entering:
$ md5sum BT5R3-GNOME-VM-32.7z
If the md5sum matches that on the website move the file to a directory where you want to keep your virtual hard drives, otherwise re-download the image.
Move to the directory where you moved the zip file and extract it.
$ p7zip -d BT5R3-GNOME-VM-32.7z
After the file has extracted, open up Virtual Box and click on the “New” button.
Enter a name for your virtual machine and select the type (Linux) and version (Ubuntu or other Linux)
Set the amount of RAM you want to allocate to the machine.
Select Use an existing hard drive file
Navigate to the directory where you extracted the hard drive files and select BT5R3-GNOME-VM-32.vmdk (or similar file without the -s###.vmdk)
OK the selection and create the virtual machine.
Start the virtual machine, enter the username and password (can be found on the back track website).
To start the windows manager type:
$ startx
