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

The first baby step in the attack process or kill chain is to conduct information harvesting, or reconnaissance, to identify the right information on the target with the use of OSINT. Passive reconnaissance provides a real-time view of an attacker's eye on a company. This is a stealthy assessment; the IP address or activities of an attacker are almost indistinguishable from normal business as usual. The same information is extremely fruitful during social engineering types of attacks, or facilitating other attacks. We have now built our own custom script to save time, and performed passive reconnaissance using both offensive and defensive OSINT.

In the next chapter, we will be learning the different types of reconnaissance in an active sense, and make use of the data that we harvested using OSINT. Although active reconnaissance techniques will provide more information...