Book Image

Kali Linux Cookbook

Book Image

Kali Linux Cookbook

Overview of this book

In this age, where online information is at its most vulnerable, knowing how to execute the same attacks that hackers use to break into your system or network helps you plug the loopholes before it's too late and can save you countless hours and money. Kali Linux is a Linux distribution designed for penetration testing and security auditing. It is the successor to BackTrack, the world's most popular penetration testing distribution. Discover a variety of popular tools of penetration testing, such as information gathering, vulnerability identification, exploitation, privilege escalation, and covering your tracks. Packed with practical recipes, this useful guide begins by covering the installation of Kali Linux and setting up a virtual environment to perform your tests. You will then learn how to eavesdrop and intercept traffic on wireless networks, bypass intrusion detection systems, and attack web applications, as well as checking for open ports, performing data forensics, and much more. The book follows the logical approach of a penetration test from start to finish with many screenshots and illustrations that help to explain each tool in detail. The Kali Linux Cookbook will serve as an excellent source of information for the security professional and novice alike!
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Kali Linux Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using dictionary attacks


In this recipe, we will examine dictionary or wordlist attacks. A dictionary attack uses a predetermined set of passwords and attempts to brute-force a password match for a given user against the wordlist. There are three types of dictionary lists that are generally generated:

  • Username Only: Lists that contain generated usernames only

  • Password Only: Lists that contain generated passwords only

  • Username and Password Lists: Lists that contain both generated usernames and passwords

For our demonstration purposes, we will utilize Crunch to generate our very own password dictionary.

Getting ready

This recipe requires an installation of Crunch on your Kali installation

How to do it...

The good thing about Kali Linux, unlike BackTrack, is that Kali already includes Crunch.

  1. Open a terminal window and enter the crunch command in order to see the Crunch help file:

    crunch
    

  2. The basic syntax for generating a password with Crunch is crunch [minimum length] [maximum length] [character set...