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)

Web application vulnerability scanners


Vulnerability scanners suffer the common shortcomings of all scanners (a scanner can only detect the signature of a known vulnerability; they cannot determine if the vulnerability can actually be exploited; there is a high incidence of false-positive reports). Furthermore, web vulnerability scanners cannot identify complex errors in business logic, and they do not accurately simulate the complex chained attacks used by hackers.

In an effort to increase reliability, most penetration testers use multiple tools to scan web services; when multiple tools report that a particular vulnerability may exist, this consensus will direct the tester to areas that may require manually verifying the findings.

Kali comes with an extensive number of vulnerability scanners for web services, and provides a stable platform for installing new scanners and extending their capabilities. This allows penetration testers to increase the effectiveness of testing by selecting scanning...