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)

Summary

In this chapter, we took a journey into different methodologies and goal-based penetration testing that help organizations to test themselves against real-time attacks. We learned how penetration testers can use Kali Linux in multiple different platforms to assess the security of data systems and networks. We've taken a quick look into installing Kali on different virtualized platforms and how we can run a Linux operating system on a Windows platform using Docker.

We've built our own verification lab, set up Active Directory Domain Services, and set up two different VMs on the same network, one of which is part of the Active Directory. Most importantly, we learned how to customize Kali to increase the security of our tools and the data that they collect. We're working to achieve the goal of making tools support our process, instead of the other way around!

In the next chapter (Chapter 2, Open Source Intelligence and Passive Reconnaissance), we will learn how effectively we can master Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) to identify the vulnerable attack surfaces of our target and create customized username and password lists to facilitate more focused attacks, extract these details from the dark web, and use other exploits.