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)

Activities on the compromised local system


It is usually possible to get guest or user access to a system. Frequently, the attacker's ability to access important information will be limited by reduced privilege levels. Therefore, a common post-exploitation activity is to escalate access privileges from guest to user to administrator and, finally, to SYSTEM. This upward progression of gaining access privileges is usually referred to as vertical escalation.

 

The user can implement several methods to gain advanced access credentials, including the following:

  • Employ a network sniffer and/or keylogger to capture transmitted user credentials (dsniff is designed to extract passwords from live transmissions or a PCAP file that has been saved from a Wireshark or tshark session).
  • Perform a search for locally stored passwords. Some users collect passwords in an email folder (frequently called passwords). Since password reuse and simple password construction systems are common, the passwords that are found...