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)

Credential harvesting and escalation attacks


Credential harvesting is the process of identifying usernames, passwords, and hashes that can be utilized to achieve the objective set by the organization for a penetration testing/red team exercise. In this section, we will walk through three different types of credential harvesting mechanism that are typically used by attackers in Kali Linux.

Password sniffers

Password sniffers are a set of tools/scripts that typically perform man-in-the-middle attacks by discovery, spoofing, sniffing the traffic, and by proxying. From our previous experience, we noted that most organizations do not utilize SSL internally; Wireshark revealed multiple usernames and passwords.

In this section, we will explore bettercap to capture SSL traffic on the network so that we can capture the credentials of network users. bettercap is similar to the previous-generation ettercap command, with the additional capability to perform network-level spoofing and sniffing. It can be...