Book Image

Hands-On Penetration Testing on Windows

By : Phil Bramwell
Book Image

Hands-On Penetration Testing on Windows

By: Phil Bramwell

Overview of this book

Windows has always been the go-to platform for users around the globe to perform administration and ad hoc tasks, in settings that range from small offices to global enterprises, and this massive footprint makes securing Windows a unique challenge. This book will enable you to distinguish yourself to your clients. In this book, you'll learn advanced techniques to attack Windows environments from the indispensable toolkit that is Kali Linux. We'll work through core network hacking concepts and advanced Windows exploitation techniques, such as stack and heap overflows, precision heap spraying, and kernel exploitation, using coding principles that allow you to leverage powerful Python scripts and shellcode. We'll wrap up with post-exploitation strategies that enable you to go deeper and keep your access. Finally, we'll introduce kernel hacking fundamentals and fuzzing testing, so you can discover vulnerabilities and write custom exploits. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed in identifying vulnerabilities within the Windows OS and developing the desired solutions for them.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

HTTP downgrading attacks with sslstrip


There once was a magical time for the sniffing hacker – a time when only certain websites were protected with SSL sessions, so most browsing took place via easily intercepted and easily mangled HTTP packets. We could sit in a coffee shop and casually listen to the environment, sipping on a latte while watching URLs and content requests fly by. If we felt like being pranksters, we could use Ettercap filters to replace any JPG in a request with one of our choosing – sometimes a picture of a cow, or sometimes it was something more sinister.

It didn't take long before the industry noticed that some unpleasant individuals were sitting in coffee shops and replacing all the JPGs with pictures of cows, and as Wi-Fi, in particular became far more ubiquitous, technologies designed to provide a high level of confidentiality for even innocuous browsing became the norm.

Some of those coffee shop cretins simply started conducting SSL man-in-the-middle attacks. Normally...