Penetration testing is becoming an important skill set for any individual to have within their toolset with the proliferation of security threats in today’s modern landscape. The issue at hand is that many individuals just don’t know where to start learning the proper way to run a penetration test for their organization. The focus of this book is to help individuals understand the penetration testing process as well as learn about the different aspects of the penetration test. Using a Raspberry Pi running on Kali Linux and various workstations and servers, we will go through various testing scenarios using open source tools to not only tell you how to use these tools but also show you how to interpret the results. This way, as you work your way through the book, you can apply what you learn daily to whichever penetration testing project you may be working on.
Chapter 1, Planning and Preparation, gets you started with the penetration testing process by using real world examples of what is required to prepare. This allows you to build the foundation of the penetration test by discussing what the goals are as well as getting buy-in from management.
Chapter 2, Information Gathering, shows the reader how to start gathering information about the environment as well as the type of information to obtain. Reconnaissance is a very important step and can make or break the penetration test.
Chapter 3, Setting up and maintaining the Command and Control Server, works with getting set up with connectivity to a C&C server that can help you with intelligence gathering and offsite processing.
Chapter 4, Vulnerability Scanning and Metasploit, focuses on scanning the environment for vulnerabilities and then using this information to try and exploit the targets that are found.
Chapter 5, Traffic Sniffing and Spoofing, gets you started on how to sniff the network and then utilize this information to run various attacks like Man-in-the-Middle attacks and spoofing attacks to gain even more insight and intelligence of what is happening on the network.
Chapter 6, Password-based Attacks, shows you the process of running various password-based attacks, obtaining credentials, and utilizing this information for future penetration testing attacks.
Chapter 7, Attacks on the Network Infrastructure, looks at the infrastructure as part of the penetration test. We will explore tools to find various holes within the infrastructure before the bad guys do.
Chapter 8, Web Application Attacks, explores how to probe and exploit web applications as part of our penetration test.
Chapter 9, Cleaning Up and Getting Out, focuses on the importance of cleaning up your tracks left behind after the penetration test is complete.
Chapter 10, Writing Up the Penetration Testing Report, the final culmination of the book, shows not only the importance of the penetration testing report but also how to format it and fill with data that was obtained during our tests.
To be able to utilize the concepts and examples in this book, having a Raspberry Pi 3 with Kali Linux is definitely recommended. It is also recommended to have additional workstations/laptops available to help not only test but also process some of the more hardware intensive tools. Kali Linux is the operating system of choice as well as the other utilities/tools that are discussed in this book . These are all open source, meaning they are free to download and use. The hardware and software covered in this book are not required if you are just looking to learn about the process of penetration testing.
This book is designed for anyone who wants to learn how a penetration test works. The layout of the book allows the reader to follow along with what they are learning on a chapter-by-chapter basis, and apply it to their real-life penetration tests. The great thing about the topics in this book is that even though the book is written by applying the knowledge you are learning into practical use, it is not required to use the book in that method. Just reading through the book will allow you to understand the penetration testing process from start to finish. Prior knowledge about networking and Linux would be an advantage; however, it is not required to follow the concepts covered in this book. Additionally, having a prior understanding of security and penetration tests at a base level will definitely be advantageous but not required due to lots of examples within the book.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "you will want to write the image to it using the dd command."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
root@kali:~# sysctl -a list | grep net.ipv4.ip_forward net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "You will need to go into VMware Fusion and navigate to File | New."
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