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)

Mapping beyond the firewall

Attackers normally start the network debugging using traceroute utility, which attempts to map all of the hosts on a route to a specific destination host or system. Once the target is reached, as the TTL (Time to Live) field will be 0, the target will discard the datagram and generate an ICMP time exceeded packet back to its originator. A regular traceroute will be as follows:

As you see from the preceding example, we cannot go beyond a particular IP, which most probably means that there is a packet filtering device at hop 3. Attackers would dig a little bit deeper to understand what is deployed on that IP.

Deploying the default UDP datagram option, it will increase the port number at every time it sends an UDP datagram. Hence, attackers will start pointing a port number to reach the final target destination.

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