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)

Bypassing a hidden SSID


ESSID is the sequence of characters that uniquely identify a wireless local area network. Hiding the ESSID is a poor method of attempting to achieve security through obscurity; unfortunately, the ESSID can be obtained by doing either of the following:

  • Sniffing the wireless environment and waiting for a client to associate to a network and then capturing that association
  • Actively deauthenticating a client to force the client to associate and then capturing that association

The aircrack tools are particularly well-suited to capture the data that's needed to unhide a hidden ESSID, as shown in the following steps:

  1. At the command prompt, confirm that wireless is enabled on the attacking system by entering the following command:
root@kali:~# airmon-ng
  1. Next, use the following ifconfig command to review the available interfaces and to determine the exact name that's used by your wireless system:
root@kali:~# ifconfig
  1. Enable your wireless interface by entering the following (you may...