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)

Objective-based penetration testing

The primary goal of a pentest/RTE is to determine the real risk, differentiating the risk rating from the scanner and giving a business risk value for each asset, along with the brand image of the organization. It's not about whether how much risk they have; rather, it's about how much they are exposed. A threat that has been found does not really constitute a risk and need not be demonstrated. For example, a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) on a brochure website may not have significant impact on the business; however, a client might accept the risk to put in a mitigation plan using a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to prevent the XSS attacks.

While objective-based penetration testing is time-based, depending on the specific problem that an organization faces, an example of an objective is: We are most worried about the online portal and fraud transactions. So, the objective now is to compromise the portal or administrators through phishing or take over the approval chains through a system flaw. Every objective comes with its own tactics, techniques, and procedures that will support the primary goal of the penetration test activity. We will be exploring all of the different ways throughout this book using Kali Linux.