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)

DNS reconnaissance and route mapping

Once a tester has identified the targets that have an online presence and contain items of interest, the next step is to identify the IP addresses and routes to the target.

DNS reconnaissance is concerned with identifying who owns a particular domain or series of IP addresses (the sort of information gained with whois although this has been completely changed with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enforcement across Europe from May 2018), the DNS information defining the actual domain names and IP addresses assigned to the target and the route between the penetration tester or the attacker and the final target.

This information gathering is semi-active—some of the information is available from freely available open sources such as DNSstuff.com, while other information is available from third parties such as DNS...