Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Vijay Kumar Velu
Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Vijay Kumar Velu

Overview of this book

This book will take you, as a tester or security practitioner through the journey of reconnaissance, vulnerability assessment, exploitation, and post-exploitation activities used by penetration testers and hackers. We will start off by using a laboratory environment to validate tools and techniques, and using an application that supports a collaborative approach to penetration testing. Further we will get acquainted with passive reconnaissance with open source intelligence and active reconnaissance of the external and internal networks. We will also focus on how to select, use, customize, and interpret the results from a variety of different vulnerability scanners. Specific routes to the target will also be examined, including bypassing physical security and exfiltration of data using different techniques. You will also get to grips with concepts such as social engineering, attacking wireless networks, exploitation of web applications and remote access connections. Later you will learn the practical aspects of attacking user client systems by backdooring executable files. You will focus on the most vulnerable part of the network—directly and bypassing the controls, attacking the end user and maintaining persistence access through social media. You will also explore approaches to carrying out advanced penetration testing in tightly secured environments, and the book's hands-on approach will help you understand everything you need to know during a Red teaming exercise or penetration testing
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Activities on the compromised local system

It is usually possible to get guest or user access to a system. Frequently, the attacker's ability to access important information will be limited by such reduced privilege levels. Therefore, a common post-exploit activity is to escalate access privileges from guest to user to administrator and, finally, to SYSTEM. This upward progression of gaining access privileges is usually referred to as vertical escalation.

The user can implement several methods to gain advanced access credentials, including the following:

  • Employ a network sniffer and/or keylogger to capture transmitted user credentials (dsniff is designed to extract passwords from live transmissions or a PCAP file saved from a Wireshark or tshark session).
  • Perform a search for locally stored passwords. Some users collect passwords in an email folder (frequently called passwords...