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)

Vulnerability Assessment

The goal of passive and active reconnaissance is to identify the exploitable target and vulnerability assessment is to find the security flaws that are most likely to support the tester's or attacker's objective (denial of service, theft, or modification of data). The vulnerability assessment during the exploit phase of the kill chain focuses on creating the access to achieve the objective—mapping of the vulnerabilities to line up the exploits and to maintain persistent access to the target.

Thousands of exploitable vulnerabilities have been identified, and most are associated with at least one proof-of-concept code file or technique to allow the system to be compromised. Nevertheless, the underlying principles that govern success are the same across networks, operating systems, and applications.

In this chapter, you will learn about the...