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 7. Exploiting Web-Based Applications

In previous chapters, we reviewed the attacker's kill chain, the specific approach used to compromise networks and devices and disclose data or hinder access to network resources. In Chapter 5, Advanced Social Engineering and Physical Security, we examined the different routes of attack, starting with physical attacks and social engineering. In Chapter 6, Wireless Attacks, we saw how wireless networks could be compromised.

In this chapter, we'll focus on one of the most common attack routes, through websites and web-based applications.

With adoption of technology, we can see multiple virtual banks in the market. These banks do not have any physical infrastructure; they are just made up of simple web/mobile applications. Web-based services are ubiquitous, and most organizations allow remote access to these services with almost constant availability. To penetration testers and attackers, however, these web applications expose backend services on the...