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

Identifying the external network infrastructure


Once the tester's identity is protected, identifying the devices on the internet-accessible portion of the network is the next critical first step in scanning a network.

Attackers and penetration testers use this information to do the following:

  • Identify devices that may confuse (load balancers) or eliminate (firewalls and packet inspection devices) test results
  • Identify devices with known vulnerabilities
  • Identify the requirement for continuing to implement stealthy scans
  • Gain an understanding of the target's focus on secure architecture and on security in general

traceroute provides basic information on packet filtering abilities; some other applications on Kali include the following:

Application

Description

lbd

Uses two DNS and HTTP-based techniques to detect load balancers (shown in the following screenshot)

miranda.py

Identifies universal plug-and-play and UPNP devices

nmap

Detects devices and determines the operating systems and their version

Shodan

Web...