Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing - Third Edition

By : Vijay Kumar Velu, Robert Beggs
Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing - Third Edition

By: Vijay Kumar Velu, Robert Beggs

Overview of this book

This book takes you, as a tester or security practitioner, through the reconnaissance, vulnerability assessment, exploitation, privilege escalation, and post-exploitation activities used by pentesters. To start with, you'll use a laboratory environment to validate tools and techniques, along with an application that supports a collaborative approach for pentesting. You'll then progress to passive reconnaissance with open source intelligence and active reconnaissance of the external and internal infrastructure. You'll also focus on how to select, use, customize, and interpret the results from different vulnerability scanners, followed by examining specific routes to the target, which include bypassing physical security and the exfiltration of data using a variety of techniques. You'll discover concepts such as social engineering, attacking wireless networks, web services, and embedded devices. Once you are confident with these topics, you'll learn the practical aspects of attacking user client systems by backdooring with fileless techniques, followed by focusing on the most vulnerable part of the network – directly attacking the end user. By the end of this book, you'll have explored approaches for carrying out advanced pentesting in tightly secured environments, understood pentesting and hacking techniques employed on embedded peripheral devices.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Vulnerability nomenclature


Vulnerability scanning employs automated processes and applications to identify vulnerabilities in a network, system, operating system, or application that may be exploitable.

When performed correctly, a vulnerability scan delivers an inventory of devices (both authorized and rogue devices), known vulnerabilities that have been actively scanned for, and usually a confirmation of how compliant the devices are with various policies and regulations.

Unfortunately, vulnerability scans are loud; they deliver multiple packets that are easily detected by most network controls and make stealth almost impossible to achieve. They also suffer from the following additional limitations:

  • For the most part, vulnerability scanners are signature-based; they can only detect known vulnerabilities, and only if there is an existing recognition signature that the scanner can apply to the target. To a penetration tester, the most effective scanners are open source and they allow the tester...