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)

Summary

In this chapter, you got to use three new tools for password cracking, and also learned how to add a new item to the main menu. Johnny, and his progenitor, John the Ripper, are the most popular tools you can find on Kali, for cracking hashes on the local machine, so you will probably choose one of these two tools when you are testing your users' password decisions.

Hydra has many more options than basic John-based tools, but with the improved power comes increased complexity. Hydra is designed to attack specific devices over the wire, but as you discovered, the attack surface is very small and the tool is very noisy.

You have also learned that Hydra can use the GPU instead of the CPU, giving you even faster cracking times.

In the next chapter, we will learn about the ancient and broken protocols, NetBIOS and LLMR, and how to exploit and gain access to Windows systems...