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

Chapter 5. Advanced Social Engineering and Physical Security

Social engineering is the art of extracting information from humans. It is a type of attack that has made great progress in recent years by exploiting behavior, and by finding the weaknesses in given circumstances and conditions. This attack can be effective when a human is tricked into providing physical access to their system. It is the single most successful attack vector used during red teaming exercises, penetration testing, or an actual attack. The success of a social engineering attacks relies on two key factors:

  • The knowledge that is gained during the reconnaissance phase. The attacker must know the names and usernames associated with the target; more importantly, the attacker must understand the concerns of the users on the network.
  • Understanding how to apply this knowledge to convince potential targets to activate the attack by impersonating, talking to them over the phone, inquiring about them, clicking on a link, or executing...