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

Commercial vulnerability scanners


Most attackers utilize open source tools to launch attacks; however, commercial vulnerability scanners come with their own advantages and disadvantages in speeding up the penetration testing process. In this section, we will learn Nessus and Nexpose installation in Kali Linux, and since these scanners are backed up by respectable companies, they do have comprehensive documentation, so we will not be taking a deep dive into configuring these tools.

Nessus

Nessus was one of the old vulnerability scanner that was started by Renaud Deraison in 1998, it used to be a open source project till 2005, the project was taken over by Tenable Network Security (co-founded by Renaud).  Nessus is one of the most commonly used commercial vulnerability scanners in the security community for network infrastructure scanning. Although Tenable has multiple security products. In this section, we will explore the installation of Nessus Professional. 

The following provides step-by...