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

Specialized scanners


The exploitation phase of the kill chain is the most dangerous one for the penetration tester or attacker; they are directly interacting with the target network or system and there is a high chance that their activity will be logged or their identity discovered. Again, stealth must be employed to minimize risks to the tester. Although no specific methodology or tool is undetectable, there are some configuration changes and specific tools that will make detection more difficult.

Another scanner worth using is the Web Application Attack and Audit Framework (w3af), a Python-based open source web application security scanner. It provides preconfigured vulnerability scans in support of standards such as OWASP. The breadth of the scanner's options comes at a price: it takes significantly longer than other scanners to review a target, and it is prone to failure over long testing periods. A w3af instance configured for a full audit of a sample website is shown in the following...