Book Image

Advanced Penetration Testing for Highly-Secured Environments: The Ultimate Security Guide

By : Lee Allen
Book Image

Advanced Penetration Testing for Highly-Secured Environments: The Ultimate Security Guide

By: Lee Allen

Overview of this book

The internet security field has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade. Everyday more people around the globe gain access to the internet and not all of them with good intentions. The need for penetration testers has grown now that the security industryhas had time to mature. Simply running a vulnerability scanner is a thing of the past and is no longer an effective method of determining a business's true security posture. Learn effective penetration testing skills so that you can effectively meet and manage the rapidly changing security needs of your company. Advanced Penetration Testing for Highly-Secured Environments will teach you how to efficiently and effectively ensure the security posture of environments that have been secured using IDS/IPS, firewalls, network segmentation, hardened system configurations and more. The stages of a penetration test are clearly defined and addressed using step-by-step instructions that you can follow on your own virtual lab.The book follows the standard penetration testing stages from start to finish with step-by-step examples. The book thoroughly covers penetration test expectations, proper scoping and planning, as well as enumeration and footprinting. You'll learn how to clean up and compile proof of concept, exploit code from the web, advanced web application testing techniques, client side attacks, post exploitation strategies, detection avoidance methods, generation of well defined reports and metrics, and setting up a penetration testing virtual lab that mimics a secured environment. The book closes by issuing a challenge to your skills and ability to perform a full penetration test against a fictional corporation; followed by a detailed walk through of the solution.Advanced Penetration Testing for Highly-Secured Environments is packed with detailed examples that reinforce enumeration, exploitation, post-exploitation, reporting skills and more.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Advanced Penetration Testing for Highly-Secured Environments: The Ultimate Security Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


This chapter provided a solid introduction to exploitation. By taking advantage of the Kioptrix which is an intentionally vulnerable Linux distribution we were able to get hands-on practice in locating exploits on Exploit-DB and on BackTrack, and then correcting any errors we found in that code. We looked at the steps necessary to truly understand the penetration testing exploitation phase such as banner grabbing and transferring files to and from an exploited machine.

We looked at password cracking and brute forcing with both John the Ripper and THC Hydra, both of which will need to be understood in depth to prepare for later chapters. Password cracking is not going to go away anytime soon and expertise of this subject can be very beneficial in the long term.

The chapter also covered the steps necessary to transfer files to and from an exploited machine; this included the set up and configuration of the FTP daemon that comes preinstalled with BackTrack 5.

Finally, we wrapped up the...