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 hacker's mind map


There is no substitute for the human mind. In this section, we will focus more on how a web application looks from the perspective of an attacker. The following diagram shows a mind map of a web application hack:

The mind map is split into two categories: attackers can attack either server-side vulnerabilities or client-side vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities normally occur for one of the following reasons:

  • Use of old or unpatched technology
  • Poor security configuration for the latest technology
  • Coding without security in mind
  • The human factor: a lack of skilled staff

On the server side, attackers would typically perform the following list of attacks:

  • Web application firewall evasion
  • Injection attacks
  • Remote code execution
  • Remote file inclusion/local file inclusion
  • Directory path traversal
  • Exploiting session management
  • Exploiting the logic of the system or application
  • Identifying any relevant information that can help them to perform more dedicated attacks

Client-side attacks are...