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

The OpenVAS network vulnerability scanner


Open Vulnerability Assessment System (OpenVAS) is an open source vulnerability assessment scanner and also a vulnerability management tool often utilized by attackers to scan a wide range of networks, which includes around 47,000 vulnerabilities in its database; however, this can be considered a slow network vulnerability scanner compared with other commercial tools such as Nessus, Nexpose, and Qualys.

If OpenVAS is not already installed, make sure your Kali is up to date and install the latest OpenVAS by running the apt-get install openvas command. Once done, run the openvas-setup command to set up OpenVAS; to make sure the installation is OK, run the openvas-check-setupcommand and it will list the top 10 items that are required to run OpenVAS effectively. Once the installation is successful, testers should be able to see the following screenshot:

The next task is to create an admin user by running the openvasmd --user=admin --new-password=YourNewPassword1...