Book Image

Hands-On Penetration Testing on Windows

By : Phil Bramwell
Book Image

Hands-On Penetration Testing on Windows

By: Phil Bramwell

Overview of this book

Windows has always been the go-to platform for users around the globe to perform administration and ad hoc tasks, in settings that range from small offices to global enterprises, and this massive footprint makes securing Windows a unique challenge. This book will enable you to distinguish yourself to your clients. In this book, you'll learn advanced techniques to attack Windows environments from the indispensable toolkit that is Kali Linux. We'll work through core network hacking concepts and advanced Windows exploitation techniques, such as stack and heap overflows, precision heap spraying, and kernel exploitation, using coding principles that allow you to leverage powerful Python scripts and shellcode. We'll wrap up with post-exploitation strategies that enable you to go deeper and keep your access. Finally, we'll introduce kernel hacking fundamentals and fuzzing testing, so you can discover vulnerabilities and write custom exploits. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed in identifying vulnerabilities within the Windows OS and developing the desired solutions for them.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 9. Weaponizing Python

It's said that computers are actually very dumb; they crunch numbers and move things around in memory. Despite this oversimplification, how they think can seem mysterious. There is no better way to get acquainted with how computers actually think than through programming. So far in this book, we've seen programming languages at different scales: assembly language, the next-to-bottom machine code made up of mnemonic opcodes; C language, the lowest of the high-level languages; and even Python, the high-level interpreted language. Python has a tremendous number of modules in its standard library that allow the pen tester to accomplish just about any task. In Chapter 1Bypassing Network Access Control, we showed how easy it is to use Scapy's functionality in our own Python script to inject specially crafted packets into the network. One way we can advance as pen testers is to learn how to leverage this power in our own custom programs. In this chapter, we're going...