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

Objectives of penetration testing


The objectives of testing are very simple and straightforward; a penetration test gives the executives, architects, and product managers 360-degree birds-eye view of the security posture of the organizations. Penetration testing also helps the decision makers in understanding what an actual attack will look like and what will be its impact on business, revenue, and goodwill. The process involves rigorous analysis of security, technical, and operational countermeasures for any potential vulnerability that ranges from poor to improper configuration to network, to hardware, firmware, or software flaws. It also helps in focusing on what's important by narrowing down the security risk and knowing how effective the current security measures are. There are other principle reasons as well:

  • As a starting point: To fix a problem, you need to first identify it. This is exactly what a penetration test does; it helps identify the problem and where it lies. It helps you understand where a breach is possible and what the exact reason for a possible breach is so that organizations can come up with an action plan to mitigate these security issues in future.
  • Prioritizing the risk: Identifying the security issues is the primary objective of a penetration test. After learning that security issues exist, it also helps in prioritizing the security issues raised based on their impact and severity.
  • Improving the overall security of the organization: Penetration testing not only helps identify technical security issues, it also helps identify the non-technical issues, such as how soon an attack can be identified, what actions can be taken if identified, how it is being escalated, to whom it is being escalated, and what to do in the event of a breach. It gives an idea of what an actual attack will look like. It also helps identify whether a gap is a technical gap or non-technical gap, such as users clicking on phishing e-mail giving access to attacks directly to their laptops, defeating all the network security devices and rules in firewall. This shows lack of employee security information training.