Book Image

Kali Linux Intrusion and Exploitation Cookbook

By : Dhruv Shah, Ishan Girdhar
Book Image

Kali Linux Intrusion and Exploitation Cookbook

By: Dhruv Shah, Ishan Girdhar

Overview of this book

With the increasing threats of breaches and attacks on critical infrastructure, system administrators and architects can use Kali Linux 2.0 to ensure their infrastructure is secure by finding out known vulnerabilities and safeguarding their infrastructure against unknown vulnerabilities. This practical cookbook-style guide contains chapters carefully structured in three phases – information gathering, vulnerability assessment, and penetration testing for the web, and wired and wireless networks. It's an ideal reference guide if you’re looking for a solution to a specific problem or learning how to use a tool. We provide hands-on examples of powerful tools/scripts designed for exploitation. In the final section, we cover various tools you can use during testing, and we help you create in-depth reports to impress management. We provide system engineers with steps to reproduce issues and fix them.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Penetration testing versus vulnerability assessment


A major difference between testing and vulnerability assessment is essentially the exploitation part. You don't perform exploitation in vulnerability assessment, but exploitation is the main focus and actual result of a test.

Here are some other noteworthy differences:

Differentiators

Vulnerability assessment

Penetration testing

Automation

Can be fully automated, up to the level of satisfactory and reliable results.

Can be automated up to a certain extent but it takes a skilled individual to look for all possible loopholes and actually use that information to exploit and penetrate the system from different entries altogether.

Time

Since it can be automated, it obviously takes less time and depends on the number of checks and number of systems it is checking. But mostly it can be done in a matter of minutes on a single machine.

Since it is manual, it needs human efficiency and creativity to think out of the box and exploit the vulnerabilities in order to gain access. It can take days to completely gain access to a system that is adequately secured.

Noise Level

Passive and creates less logs

Noisy and aggressive; creates a lot of logs and can be very messy

False Positives

Reports false positives

Eliminates false positives

Approach

Programmed

Intuitive

Nature of tests

Identical tests/scans

Accurate/thorough

Exploitation

N/A

Complete access on system