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 services on Kali Linux

There are several services that you will want to turn on when you need them. The general use of services in Windows and Linux is to have them start when the computer boots up. Most administrators spend little time managing services unless something goes wrong. In the Kali system, you will tend to shut down the workstation when you are not actually doing security analysis tasks, and you certainly do not want security tools, such as OpenVAS or Metasploit, that you have on your workstation to be accessible over the internet. This means that you will want to start them when you need them and shut them down when you are not using them.

You can find the commands to start and stop Kali Services from the Applications menu—Applications | System Services

Another way to work with services is by using systemctl on the command line. As an example, consider...