Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Vijay Kumar Velu
Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Vijay Kumar Velu

Overview of this book

This book will take you, as a tester or security practitioner through the journey of reconnaissance, vulnerability assessment, exploitation, and post-exploitation activities used by penetration testers and hackers. We will start off by using a laboratory environment to validate tools and techniques, and using an application that supports a collaborative approach to penetration testing. Further we will get acquainted with passive reconnaissance with open source intelligence and active reconnaissance of the external and internal networks. We will also focus on how to select, use, customize, and interpret the results from a variety of different vulnerability scanners. Specific routes to the target will also be examined, including bypassing physical security and exfiltration of data using different techniques. You will also get to grips with concepts such as social engineering, attacking wireless networks, exploitation of web applications and remote access connections. Later you will learn the practical aspects of attacking user client systems by backdooring executable files. You will focus on the most vulnerable part of the network—directly and bypassing the controls, attacking the end user and maintaining persistence access through social media. You will also explore approaches to carrying out advanced penetration testing in tightly secured environments, and the book's hands-on approach will help you understand everything you need to know during a Red teaming exercise or penetration testing
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Local system escalation

We may be able to run the Meterpreter shell in the content of the user. There are multiple ways to escalate the privilege on the local system. This can be achieved by PowerShell custom exploits, as well as Meterpreter shell.

When attackers initially gain access to the system and try to run system-level commands, they receive the response access denied, or no privilege available to run the commands on the target system. This can be verified by running the getsystem command from the Meterpreter console, as shown in the following screenshot:

This can be bypassed by using the post exploit module by sending background to your Meterpreter shell and using the bypassuac post exploit module, as shown in the following screenshot:

meterpreter > background
[*] Backgrounding session 2...
msf exploit(psexec) > use exploit/windows/local/bypassuac
msf exploit(bypassuac...