Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing - Third Edition

By : Vijay Kumar Velu, Robert Beggs
Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing - Third Edition

By: Vijay Kumar Velu, Robert Beggs

Overview of this book

This book takes you, as a tester or security practitioner, through the reconnaissance, vulnerability assessment, exploitation, privilege escalation, and post-exploitation activities used by pentesters. To start with, you'll use a laboratory environment to validate tools and techniques, along with an application that supports a collaborative approach for pentesting. You'll then progress to passive reconnaissance with open source intelligence and active reconnaissance of the external and internal infrastructure. You'll also focus on how to select, use, customize, and interpret the results from different vulnerability scanners, followed by examining specific routes to the target, which include bypassing physical security and the exfiltration of data using a variety of techniques. You'll discover concepts such as social engineering, attacking wireless networks, web services, and embedded devices. Once you are confident with these topics, you'll learn the practical aspects of attacking user client systems by backdooring with fileless techniques, followed by focusing on the most vulnerable part of the network – directly attacking the end user. By the end of this book, you'll have explored approaches for carrying out advanced pentesting in tightly secured environments, understood pentesting and hacking techniques employed on embedded peripheral devices.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Goal-Based Penetration Testing

Everything starts with a goal. In this chapter, we will discuss the importance of goal-based penetration testing with a set of objectives and discuss misconceptions and how a typical vulnerability scan, penetration testing, and red teaming exercise can fail without the importance of a goal. This chapter also provides an overview of security testing and setting up a verification lab and focuses on customizing Kali to support some advanced aspects of penetration testing. By the end of this chapter, you'll have learned the following:

  • An overview of security testing
  • Misconceptions of vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, and red teaming exercises
  • History and purpose of Kali Linux
  • Updating and organizing Kali
  • Setting up defined targets
  • Building a verification lab