Book Image

Securing Network Infrastructure

By : Sairam Jetty, Sagar Rahalkar
Book Image

Securing Network Infrastructure

By: Sairam Jetty, Sagar Rahalkar

Overview of this book

Digitization drives technology today, which is why it’s so important for organizations to design security mechanisms for their network infrastructures. Analyzing vulnerabilities is one of the best ways to secure your network infrastructure. This Learning Path begins by introducing you to the various concepts of network security assessment, workflows, and architectures. You will learn to employ open source tools to perform both active and passive network scanning and use these results to analyze and design a threat model for network security. With a firm understanding of the basics, you will then explore how to use Nessus and Nmap to scan your network for vulnerabilities and open ports and gain back door entry into a network. As you progress through the chapters, you will gain insights into how to carry out various key scanning tasks, including firewall detection, OS detection, and access management to detect vulnerabilities in your network. By the end of this Learning Path, you will be familiar with the tools you need for network scanning and techniques for vulnerability scanning and network protection. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt books: •Network Scanning Cookbook by Sairam Jetty •Network Vulnerability Assessment by Sagar Rahalkar
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Setting up a Kali virtual machine


Performing vulnerability assessment or a penetration test involves a series of tasks that need to be performed with the help of multiple tools and utilities. For every task involved in the process, there are tools available, both commercial as well as freeware and open source. It all depends on our choice of tool that suits best as per the context.

For performing an end-to-end assessment, we can either have individual tools downloaded as and when required or we can use a distribution such as Kali Linux that comes with all required tools pre-installed. Kali Linux is a stable, flexible, powerful, and proven platform for penetration testing. It has a baseline of tools that are required to perform various tasks across all phases of penetration testing. It also allows you to easily add tools and utilities that aren't part of the default installation.

Hence, Kali Linux is really a good choice of platform to get started with vulnerability assessments and penetration...