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)

Bypassing a hidden SSID

The ESSID is the sequence of characters that uniquely identify a wireless local area network. Hiding the ESSID is a poor method of attempting to achieve security through obscurity; unfortunately, the ESSID can only be obtained by doing either of the following:

  • Sniffing the wireless environment and waiting for a client to associate to a network and then capturing that association
  • Actively deauthenticating a client to force the client to associate and then capturing that association

The aircrack tools are particularly well-suited to capturing the data needed to unhide a hidden ESSID, as shown in the following steps:

  1. At the command line, confirm that wireless is enabled on the attacking system by entering the following command:
root@kali:~# airmon-ng
  1. Next, use the following ifconfig command to review the available interfaces and to determine the exact...