Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing - Third Edition

By : Vijay Kumar Velu, Robert Beggs
Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing - Third Edition

By: Vijay Kumar Velu, Robert Beggs

Overview of this book

This book takes you, as a tester or security practitioner, through the reconnaissance, vulnerability assessment, exploitation, privilege escalation, and post-exploitation activities used by pentesters. To start with, you'll use a laboratory environment to validate tools and techniques, along with an application that supports a collaborative approach for pentesting. You'll then progress to passive reconnaissance with open source intelligence and active reconnaissance of the external and internal infrastructure. You'll also focus on how to select, use, customize, and interpret the results from different vulnerability scanners, followed by examining specific routes to the target, which include bypassing physical security and the exfiltration of data using a variety of techniques. You'll discover concepts such as social engineering, attacking wireless networks, web services, and embedded devices. Once you are confident with these topics, you'll learn the practical aspects of attacking user client systems by backdooring with fileless techniques, followed by focusing on the most vulnerable part of the network – directly attacking the end user. By the end of this book, you'll have explored approaches for carrying out advanced pentesting in tightly secured environments, understood pentesting and hacking techniques employed on embedded peripheral devices.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we examined web apps and the user authorization services they provide from the perspective of an attacker. We applied the kill chain perspective to web applications and their services in order to understand the correct application of reconnaissance and vulnerability scanning.

Several different techniques were presented; we focused on the hacker's mindset while attacking a web application, and looked at the methodology used when penetration testing a web application. We learned how client-side proxies can be used to perform various different attacks, looked at tools to perform brute-forcing on websites, and covered OS-level commands through web applications.

We completed the chapter with an examination of a web shell specific to web services.

In Chapter 8, Client-Side Exploitation, we will learn how to identify and attack client-side exploits that connect users to web services, and how to escalate privileges to achieve the objective.