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)

Wireless reconnaissance

The first step in conducting a wireless attack is to conduct reconnaissance—this identifies the exact target access point and highlights the other wireless networks that could impact testing.

If you are using a USB-connected wireless card to connect to a Kali virtual machine, make sure that the USB connection has been disconnected from the host operating system and that it is attached to the virtual machine by clicking on the USB connection icon, which is indicated by an arrow in the following screenshot:

Next, determine which wireless interfaces are available by running iwconfig from the command line, as shown in the following screenshot:

For certain attacks, you may wish to increase the power output of the adapter. This is especially useful if you are collocated with a legitimate wireless access point, and you want the targets to connect to a...