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

Privilege escalation on Linux


In this section, we'll see how we can exploit a vulnerability in a Linux system and then escalate our privileges. We'll be using Metasploitable 2 as our target.

Before we can even think of privilege escalation, we must have at least normal-level access to the target system. In this case, our target system's IP address is 192.168.25.129. We start by initiating SPARTA in order to gather some quick information about our target. We add the target IP in the scope of the SPARTA scan, as shown in the following screenshot:

 

Once the SPARTA scan is complete, we get to know what services are running on our target system. Now we find out that the target system is running one service, distccd (as shown in the following screenshot), that is a distributed computing application used for source-code compilation:

Now that we know the service to be exploited, we'll open up the Metasploit console to look for any exploits related to distcc:

We get an exploit named distcc_exec readily...