2 million downloads and nobody cares ...

As I'm enjoying a little bit of holidays before I start my new job in 2013, I'm also having the privilege of setting up my new work machine. Some tools are must haves for anybody doing infosec work, one of them undoubtedly is 'The Social Engineering Toolkit' (SET) written by Dave Kennedy of TrustedSec.

Dave is awesome and not only for writing SET. This post is not intended to criticize Dave in any way, rather it is written to point out something I've noticed in this community for quite a while now. Everybody cheers when another free tool is released. Metasploit, SET, NMap, Wireshark, OllyDbg, ... you name it, we use it and we throw our hands in the air like we just don't ... seriously, we really don't care.

These tools are written by people, smart people who have limited bandwidth for these efforts. They spend time away from their families to give this community tools that we use to do our jobs ... the least we can do is give something back.

Now, I remember sitting in a talk by HD Moore in 2007 at FOSDEM, a conference in Brussels (Belgium) where he explained why he put so much effort in making sure that Metasploit worked on Windows. A lot of people had been commenting that pentesters shouldn't use Windows and enabling Metasploit on Windows wasn't that much of a priority. HD subscribed to another logic, if 90% of the computer using population couldn't run Metasploit, how then could it become more awesome than it already was? (It was something along those lines but maybe not literally, it's 5 years ago and HD already spoke at 500 words per minute...).

This brings me to today, where I'm setting up my new work machine, a MacBook Pro, and thus getting to the point where I check-out SET and go run "./setup.py install" only to be greeted by this message :

"Installer not finished for this type of Linux distro."

Now, we may not be the ones who invent and write the spiffy tools but if we have any sense of community we CAN be the ones who enable them to run (easily) on as many platforms as possible.

Python 2.7.2 is installed by default on OS X and so is easy_install. The modules required for SET are the following :

• pexpect
• beautifulsoup
• pycrypto
• pyopenssl
• pefile

The original setup.py file lists them under the names as they are known in aptitude so finding out those names was the hardest part of modding the setup.py script to work on Mac as well.

add the following elif to the script and it will smoothly install all dependencies:


elif os.path.isfile("/mach_kernel"):
            subprocess.Popen("easy_install pexpect beautifulsoup pycrypto pyopenssl pefile", shell=True).wait()

It uses "/mach_kernel" to identify the host as an OS X machine and then proceeds to install all dependencies using easy_install. If you paste the elif statement at line 35 of the existing script, you're done.

Update -- as I was saying...contribute:

The Grugq was nice enough to point out the platform module:

add the following line to the top of the script ( where all the other imports happen ) :

import platform

then modify my previous contribution to :


elif platform.system()==Darwin:
            subprocess.Popen("easy_install pexpect beautifulsoup pycrypto pyopenssl pefile", shell=True).wait()


Using a more standard setup.py would make life a little easier but I understand Dave for rolling his own.
End Update

Have fun with it and next time you find something that doesn't work as smoothly as you would expect and you have some time to fix it, do it yourself instead of shooting the developer an email.

Peace out.

P.S. : yes, the update was sent to Dave as well ... this post does not have the intention to document an update, it is meant to point out how all of us can work together to make things better,