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 scanning with Nmap


There are no security operating distributions without Nmap. So far, we have discussed how to utilize Nmap during active reconnaissance, but attackers don't just use Nmap to find open ports and services, but also engage Nmap to perform the vulnerability assessment. As of March 10, 2017, the latest version of Nmap is 7.40 and it ships with 500+ NSE scripts, as shown in the following screenshot:

Penetration testers utilize Nmap's most powerful and flexible features, which allow them to write their own scripts and also automate them to simplify the exploitation. Primarily, the NSE was developed for the following reasons:

  • Network discovery: The primary purpose that attackers utilize Nmap for is network discovery, as we learned in the active reconnaissance section in Chapter 3, Active Reconnaissance of External and Internal Networks.
  • Classier version detection of a service: There are thousands of services with multiple version details for the same service, so Nmap...