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

Environment configuration and setup


While our basic Kali setup is up and running, we also need to install and configure some additional services that we might need during our assessment. In the upcoming sections, we will discuss a few such useful services in Kali Linux.

Web server

A web server is going to be of help to us during the exploitation phase, wherein we may need to host a backdoor executable. The Apache web server is installed by default in Kali Linux. We can start the Apache web server using the service apache2 start command, as shown in the following screenshot.

We can verify whether the service started successfully  by using the netstat -an | grep ::80 command: 

Now that the Apache server is up and running, we can verify it through the browser as well. By hitting the localhost (127.0.0.1), we are able to see the default Apache web page as shown in the following screenshot:

If we want to change the default page or if we wish to host any files, we can do so by placing the required...