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)

Creating a rogue physical device


Kali also facilitates attacks where the intruder has direct physical access to systems and the network. This can be a risky attack, as the intruder may be spotted by an observant human, or caught on a surveillance device. However, the reward can be significant, because the intruder can compromise specific systems that have valuable data.

Physical access is usually a direct result of social engineering, especially when impersonation is used. Common impersonations include the following:

  • A person who claims to be from the help desk or IT support, and just needs to quickly interrupt the victim by installing a system upgrade.
  • A vendor who drops by to talk to a client, and then excuses himself to talk to someone else or visit a restroom.
  • A delivery person dropping off a package. Attackers can buy a delivery uniform online; however, since most people assume that anyone who is dressed all in brown and pushing a handcart filled with boxes is a UPS delivery person, uniforms...