Book Image

Kali Linux Network Scanning Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Michael Hixon, Justin Hutchens
Book Image

Kali Linux Network Scanning Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Michael Hixon, Justin Hutchens

Overview of this book

With the ever-increasing amount of data flowing in today’s world, information security has become vital to any application. This is where Kali Linux comes in. Kali Linux focuses mainly on security auditing and penetration testing. This step-by-step cookbook on network scanning trains you in important scanning concepts based on version 2016.2. It will enable you to conquer any network environment through a range of network scanning techniques and will also equip you to script your very own tools. Starting with the fundamentals of installing and managing Kali Linux, this book will help you map your target with a wide range of network scanning tasks, including discovery, port scanning, fingerprinting, and more. You will learn how to utilize the arsenal of tools available in Kali Linux to conquer any network environment. The book offers expanded coverage of the popular Burp Suite and has new and updated scripts for automating scanning and target exploitation. You will also be shown how to identify remote services, how to assess security risks, and how various attacks are performed. You will cover the latest features of Kali Linux 2016.2, which includes the enhanced Sparta tool and many other exciting updates. This immersive guide will also encourage the creation of personally scripted tools and the skills required to create them.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Web application scanning with Nikto

Nikto is a command-line tool in Kali Linux that can be used to evaluate a web application for known security issues. Nikto spiders through a target application and also makes numerous preconfigured requests, attempting to identify potentially dangerous scripts and files that exist on an application. In this recipe, we will discuss how to run Nikto against a web application and how to interpret the results.

Getting ready

To use Nikto to perform web application analysis against a target, you will need to have a remote system that is running one or more web applications. In the examples provided, an instance of Metasploitable2 is used to perform this task. Metasploitable2 has several preinstalled vulnerable web applications running...