Book Image

Kali Linux 2: Windows Penetration Testing

Book Image

Kali Linux 2: Windows Penetration Testing

Overview of this book

Microsoft Windows is one of the two most common OS and managing its security has spawned the discipline of IT security. Kali Linux is the premier platform for testing and maintaining Windows security. Kali is built on the Debian distribution of Linux and shares the legendary stability of that OS. This lets you focus on using the network penetration, password cracking, forensics tools and not the OS. This book has the most advanced tools and techniques to reproduce the methods used by sophisticated hackers to make you an expert in Kali Linux penetration testing. First, you are introduced to Kali's top ten tools and other useful reporting tools. Then, you will find your way around your target network and determine known vulnerabilities to be able to exploit a system remotely. Next, you will prove that the vulnerabilities you have found are real and exploitable. You will learn to use tools in seven categories of exploitation tools. Further, you perform web access exploits using tools like websploit and more. Security is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain. Passwords are often that weak link. Thus, you learn about password attacks that can be used in concert with other approaches to break into and own a network. Moreover, you come to terms with network sniffing, which helps you understand which users are using services you can exploit, and IP spoofing, which can be used to poison a system's DNS cache. Once you gain access to a machine or network, maintaining access is important. Thus, you not only learn penetrating in the machine you also learn Windows privilege’s escalations. With easy to follow step-by-step instructions and support images, you will be able to quickly pen test your system and network.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Kali Linux 2: Windows Penetration Testing
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Running services on Kali Linux


There are several services that you will want to turn on when you need them. The general use of services in Windows and Linux is to have them start when the computer boots up. Most administrators spend little time managing services unless something goes wrong. In the Kali system, you will tend to shut down the workstation when you are not actually doing security analysis tasks, and you certainly do not want the security tools, like OpenVAS or Metasploit that you have on your workstation, to be accessible over the Internet. This means that you will want to start them when you need them, and shut them down when you are not using them.

You can find the commands to start and stop Kali Services from the Application menu: Kali Linux | System Services | Metasploit | Community / Pro [Start|Stop]

Another way to work with services is using the command line. As an example, consider HTTP (Apache2). There are several options for services:

  • Start – This starts the Apache web server and shows the process ID (PID)

  • Status – Shows the status of the server. Is it up? Is it down? Is it stuck?

  • Restart – Takes the server down and restarts it on a different PID. Use this if the server is stuck or if you have changed the networking processes on which the server depends.

  • Reload – Re-reads the configuration. Use this when you make minor changes on the configurations.

  • Stop – This shuts down the web server.