A little help

[Sauberbmw]

umm, i am getting a mac book pro in a couple of weeks and i was wondering if OS x is a good platform for hacking. if not, what is the best OS for hacking.

[mutants_r_us_guild]

I don't imagine there a alot of good hacking apps for Mac. At least not many Hash Crackers... but there should be at least a handful. The main problem I see here is you won't be able to complete the app challenges here unless you run them under a virtual machine. At least Linux has WINE.

[Sonic7145]

Basically, everything but a Mac. If you still can, I recommend reconsidering.

[nathandelane]

If your Mac Book is an x86 architecture, i.e. one of the newest Mac Books, then you can load a live Linux like Knoppix and use that to complete the challenges. If it is an IBM chipset architecture, then I believe that PuppyLinux and a couple of others will aid you with a Live distribution or dual boot mode. Another thing is, who cares if there doesn't already exist a good hash brute forcing program on Mac, Mac comes with all of the development tools, so why not make your own? This may seem like a wild challenge, but hash brute forcing is a dictionary attack. You just need a dictionary of hashes for different length password, random- (i.e. combinations of letters) and real word-based, and several algorithms especially the most popular ones, like MD4, MD5, and SHA1.

[anonHacker]

Well, Mac OS X is a Unix OS...