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 focused on the immediate actions that follow the exploitation of a target system. We reviewed the initial rapid assessment that's conducted to characterize the server and the local environment. We also learned how to use various post-exploitation tools to locate target files of interest, create user accounts, and perform horizontal escalation to harvest more information that's specific to other users. We focused on Metasploit's Meterpreter usage, the Empire PowerShell tool, and Crack-Map-Exec so that we could collect more information to perform lateral movement and privilege attacks. We also learned about the usage of the Veil-Pillage framework.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to escalate privileges from that of a normal user to the highest level possible, and also exploit the weaknesses that can be found in an Active Directory environment.