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

Implementing exploits from BackTrack


In this recipe, we will examine some of the methods to implement exploits from within BackTrack 5. With each release of BackTrack, the BackTrack community comes up with new exploits, and enhancements to previous exploits. An exploit involves using a bug or vulnerability in a piece of software or program in order to cause it to work in a manner other than originally intended. This could, for example, be as simple as using a vulnerability in an application, let's say a website, that will allow us to gain access to the database server and escalate our privileges to become a superuser on the overall machine. As new software is released, potential vulnerabilities or bugs are found in those software packages. In many cases, a hacker would find the vulnerability and create an "exploit" to take advantage of the vulnerability. Due to this, the BackTrack owners and community at large continually update the distribution to include these new exploits.

How to do...