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)

Running Kali from the Live DVD

Running Kali Linux from Live Disk is best when you are doing forensics or recovery tasks. Live Disk doesn't write anything to the machine's hard drives. Some tools, such as OpenVAS, will not work at all, because they have to be configured and file updates must be saved. You can't do this from the DVD.

To run Kali from the DVD, just load the disk in the machine you are testing and boot from it. You will see the following screen. This is the screen from which you chose the Graphical Installer in an earlier section of this chapter. We will discuss the options now. Note that there are several options in boot live from the DVD.

  • Booting from the first option loads Kali complete with a working network stack. You can run a lot of the tools over the network with this option. One of the best uses for this mode is the recovery of a dead machine...