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)

The Social Engineering Toolkit (SET)

SET was created and written by David Kennedy (ReL1K), and it is maintained by an active group of collaborators (www.social-engineer.org). It is an open source Python-driven framework that is specifically designed to facilitate social engineering attacks.

The tool was designed with the objective of achieving security by training. A significant advantage of SET is its interconnectivity with the Metasploit framework, which provides the payloads needed for exploitation, the encryption to bypass antivirus, and the listener module, which connects to the compromised system when it sends a shell back to the attacker.

To open SET in a Kali distribution, go to Applications| Social Engineering Tools | setoolkit, or enter setoolkit at a shell prompt. You will be presented with the main menu, as shown in the following screenshot:

If you select 1) Social...