Book Image

Kali Linux 2018: Windows Penetration Testing - Second Edition

By : Wolf Halton, Bo Weaver
Book Image

Kali Linux 2018: Windows Penetration Testing - Second Edition

By: Wolf Halton, Bo Weaver

Overview of this book

Microsoft Windows is one of the two most common OSes, and managing its security has spawned the discipline of IT security. Kali Linux is the premier platform for testing and maintaining Windows security. Kali is built on the Debian distribution of Linux and shares the legendary stability of that OS. This lets you focus on using the network penetration, password cracking, and forensics tools, and not the OS. This book has the most advanced tools and techniques to reproduce the methods used by sophisticated hackers to make you an expert in Kali Linux penetration testing. You will start by learning about the various desktop environments that now come with Kali. The book covers network sniffers and analysis tools to uncover the Windows protocols in use on the network. You will see several tools designed to improve your average in password acquisition, from hash cracking, online attacks, offline attacks, and rainbow tables to social engineering. It also demonstrates several use cases for Kali Linux tools like Social Engineering Toolkit, and Metasploit, to exploit Windows vulnerabilities. Finally, you will learn how to gain full system-level access to your compromised system and then maintain that access. By the end of this book, you will be able to quickly pen test your system and network using easy-to-follow instructions and support images.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Setting up a test environment

Developing your test environment requires virtual machine examples of all of the Windows operating systems that you are testing against. For instance, an application developer might be running very old browser/OS test machines to see what breaks for customers running antique hardware. In this example, we are running Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 10. We are using Oracle VirtualBox for desktop virtualization, but if you are more comfortable using VMWare, then use that instead. It is important to use machines that you can isolate from the main network, just in case the malware acts as it should, and attempts to infect the surrounding machines.

Creating your victim machine(s)

If you already have...