Book Image

BackTrack 5 Cookbook

By : Willie L. Pritchett, David De Smet
Book Image

BackTrack 5 Cookbook

By: Willie L. Pritchett, David De Smet

Overview of this book

<p>BackTrack is a Linux-based penetration testing arsenal that aids security professionals in the ability to perform assessments in a purely native environment dedicated to hacking. BackTrack is a distribution based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution aimed at digital forensics and penetration testing use. It is named after backtracking, a search algorithm.<br /><br />"BackTrack 5 Cookbook" provides you with practical recipes featuring many popular tools that cover the basics of a penetration test: information gathering, vulnerability identification, exploitation, priviledge escalation, and covering your tracks.<br /><br />The book begins by covering the installation of BackTrack 5 and setting up a virtual environment to perform your tests.<br /><br />We then dip into recipes involving the basic principles of a penetration test such as information gathering, vulnerability identification, and exploitation. You will further learn about privilege escalation, radio network analysis, Voice over IP, Password cracking, and BackTrack forensics.<br /><br />"BackTrack 5 Cookbook" will serve as an excellent source of information for the security professional and novice alike.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
BackTrack 5 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Operating system fingerprinting


At this point of the information gathering process, we should now have documented a list of IP addresses, active machines, and open ports identified from the target organization. The next step in the process is determining the running operating system of the active machines in order to know the type of systems we're pentesting.

Getting ready

A Wireshark capture file is needed in order to complete step 2 of this recipe.

How to do it...

Let's begin the process of OS fingerprinting from a terminal window:

  1. Using Nmap, we issue the following command with the -O option to enable the OS detection feature:

    nmap -O 192.168.56.102
    
  2. Use p0f to analyze a Wireshark capture file:

    p0f -s /tmp/targethost.pcap -o p0f-result.log -l
    
    p0f - passive os fingerprinting utility, version 2.0.8
    (C) M. Zalewski <[email protected]>, W. Stearns <[email protected]>
    p0f: listening (SYN) on 'targethost.pcap', 230 sigs (16 generic), rule: 'all'.
    [+] End of input file.