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)

Using public exploits


Every attack always has eyes out, looking for public exploits and modifying them according to their requirements. The latest exploit was on April 14, 2017, that is, EternalBlue, which rocked the entire internet world, thus creating an awareness of what ransomware malware is all about. However, in this section, we will take a deep dive into utilizing the known available exploit forums and also how we can onboard them into our Kali Linux system.

 

Locating and verifying publicly available exploits

Many a time, penetration testers find a zero-day exploit during their tests, which they normally inform the company of. However, in the real case of attackers, any vulnerabilities that are found will be made into an exploit, which is then sold for money/fame. One of the important aspects of penetration testing is to find publicly available exploits on the internet and provide proof of concept.

The initial exploit database that was born on the internet was Milw0rm. Using the same...