Book Image

Network Vulnerability Assessment

By : Sagar Rahalkar
Book Image

Network Vulnerability Assessment

By: Sagar Rahalkar

Overview of this book

The tech world has been taken over by digitization to a very large extent, and so it’s become extremely important for an organization to actively design security mechanisms for their network infrastructures. Analyzing vulnerabilities can be one of the best ways to secure your network infrastructure. Network Vulnerability Assessment starts with network security assessment concepts, workflows, and architectures. Then, you will use open source tools to perform both active and passive network scanning. As you make your way through the chapters, you will use these scanning results to analyze and design a threat model for network security. In the concluding chapters, you will dig deeper into concepts such as IP network analysis, Microsoft Services, and mail services. You will also get to grips with various security best practices, which will help you build your network security mechanism. By the end of this book, you will be in a position to build a security framework fit for an organization.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Cracking passwords

Password is one of the basic mechanism used for authenticating a user into a system. During our information gathering and enumeration phase, we may come across various services running on the target which are password-protected such as SSH, FTP, and so on. In order to gain access to these services, we will want to crack passwords using some of the following techniques:

  • Dictionary attack: In a dictionary attack, we feed the password cracker a file with a large number of words. The password cracker then tries all the words from the supplied file as probable passwords on the target system. If matched, we are presented with the correct password. In Kali Linux, there are several word-lists which can be used for password cracking. These word-lists are located in /usr/share/wordlists as shown in the following image:

  • Brute-force attack: If password isn't any...