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 (21 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Persistence


To be effective, the attacker must be able to maintain interactive persistence; they must have a two-way communication channel with the exploited system (interactive) that remains on the compromised system for a long period of time without being discovered (persistence). This type of connectivity is a requirement for the following reasons:

  • Network intrusions may be detected, and the compromised systems may be identified and patched
  • Some exploits only work once because the vulnerability is intermittent, or because exploitation causes the system to fail or to change, rendering the vulnerability unusable
  • Attackers may need to return multiple times to the same target for various reasons
  • The target's usefulness is not always immediately known at the time it is compromised

The tool used to maintain interactive persistence is usually referred to by classic terms such as backdoor or rootkit. However, the trend toward long-term persistence by both automated malware and human attacks has blurred...