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)

Physical attacks at the console


In this section, we will explore different types of attack that are typically performed on a system with physical access.

samdump2 and chntpw

One of the most popular ways to dump password hashes is to utilize samdump2. This can be done by turning on the power of the acquired system and then booting it through our Kali USB stick by making the required changes in the BIOS.

  1. Once the system is booted through Kali, by default the local hard drive must be mounted as a media drive (assuming the media drive is not encrypted with PGP or similar), as shown in the following screenshot:

  1. If the drive is not mountable, the attackers can manually mount the drive by running the following commands:
mkdir /mnt/target1mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/target1
  1. Once the system is mounted, navigate to the mounted folder (in our case, it is /media/root/<ID>/Windows/System32/Config), and run samdump2 SYSTEM SAM, as shown in the following screenshot. The SYSTEM and SAM files should display all...