Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning for Penetration Testing

By : Chiheb Chebbi
Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning for Penetration Testing

By: Chiheb Chebbi

Overview of this book

Cyber security is crucial for both businesses and individuals. As systems are getting smarter, we now see machine learning interrupting computer security. With the adoption of machine learning in upcoming security products, it’s important for pentesters and security researchers to understand how these systems work, and to breach them for testing purposes. This book begins with the basics of machine learning and the algorithms used to build robust systems. Once you’ve gained a fair understanding of how security products leverage machine learning, you'll dive into the core concepts of breaching such systems. Through practical use cases, you’ll see how to find loopholes and surpass a self-learning security system. As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll focus on topics such as network intrusion detection and AV and IDS evasion. We’ll also cover the best practices when identifying ambiguities, and extensive techniques to breach an intelligent system. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with identifying loopholes in a self-learning security system and will be able to efficiently breach a machine learning system.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Network attacks taxonomy

When it comes to network anomalies, our job is protecting the organization's network from intruders. A network intrusion is a malicious activity that threatens the security of the network. Information security professionals have suggested many categorizations to classify network attacks for better study. For example, they have classified network attacks into the following:

  • Infection (malware)
  • Exploding (buffer overflow)
  • Probing (sniffing)
  • Cheating (spoofing)
  • Traverse (brute-forcing)
  • Concurrency (DDoS)

Attacks can also be categorized into passive and active attacks. An active attack is when the attacker has a direct effect on the network. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has classified active attacks into four major categories, in its intrusion detection evaluation plan. The four categories are as follows:

  • Denial of Service...