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)

The Metasploit Framework


The Metasploit Framework (MSF) is an open source tool that was designed to facilitate penetration testing. Written in the Ruby programming language, it uses a modular approach to facilitating exploits during the exploitation phase in kill-chain methodology. This makes it easier to develop and code exploits, and it also allows for complex attacks to be easily implemented.

 

The following screenshot depicts an overview of the MSF architecture and components:

The framework can be split into three main sections:

  • Libraries
  • Interfaces
  • Modules

Libraries

MSF is built using various functions and libraries, as well as a programming language such as Ruby. To utilize these functions, first the penetration testers must understand what these functions are, how to trigger them, what parameters should be passed to the function, and what the expected results are.

All of the libraries are listed in the /usr/share/Metasploit-framework/lib/ folder, as shown in the following screenshot:

 

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