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)

The OpenVAS network vulnerability scanner

Open Vulnerability Assessment System (OpenVAS) is an open source vulnerability assessment scanner and also a vulnerability management tool that's often utilized by attackers to scan a wide range of networks. It includes around 47,000 vulnerabilities in its database; however, this is considered a slow network vulnerability scanner compared to other commercial tools, such as Nessus, nexpose, and Qualys.

If OpenVAS is already not installed, make sure your Kali is up to date and install the latest OpenVAS by running the apt-get install Openvas command. Once that's done, run the openvas-setup command to set up OpenVAS. To make sure the installation is okay, the penetration testers can run the openvas-check-setup command and it will list down the top 10 items that are required to run OpenVAS effectively. Upon successful installation...