Book Image

Securing Network Infrastructure

By : Sairam Jetty, Sagar Rahalkar
Book Image

Securing Network Infrastructure

By: Sairam Jetty, Sagar Rahalkar

Overview of this book

Digitization drives technology today, which is why it’s so important for organizations to design security mechanisms for their network infrastructures. Analyzing vulnerabilities is one of the best ways to secure your network infrastructure. This Learning Path begins by introducing you to the various concepts of network security assessment, workflows, and architectures. You will learn to employ open source tools to perform both active and passive network scanning and use these results to analyze and design a threat model for network security. With a firm understanding of the basics, you will then explore how to use Nessus and Nmap to scan your network for vulnerabilities and open ports and gain back door entry into a network. As you progress through the chapters, you will gain insights into how to carry out various key scanning tasks, including firewall detection, OS detection, and access management to detect vulnerabilities in your network. By the end of this Learning Path, you will be familiar with the tools you need for network scanning and techniques for vulnerability scanning and network protection. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt books: •Network Scanning Cookbook by Sairam Jetty •Network Vulnerability Assessment by Sagar Rahalkar
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Basics of Kali Linux


The default credentials in order to access Kali Linux are username:root and password:toor. However, after the first login, it is important to change the default credentials and set a new password. A new password can be set using the passwd command as shown in the following screenshot:

Kali Linux is comprehensively used for network and application penetration testing. So it is important that Kali Linux is connected to the network as a standalone Kali installation wouldn't be of much use. The first step in ensuring network connectivity is checking whether Kali has a valid IP address. We can use the ifconfig command as shown in the following screenshot and confirm the IP address allocation:

Now that we have changed the default credentials and also affirmed network connectivity, it's now time to check the exact version of our Kali installation. This includes the exact build details, including kernel and platform details. The uname -a command gives us the required details as...