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)

Reconnaissance of web apps


Web applications and the delivery of services from those apps are particularly complex. Typically, services are delivered to the end user using a multi-tiered architecture with application servers and web servers that are accessible from the public internet, while communicating with middleware services, backend servers, and databases located on the internal network.

The complexity is increased by several additional factors that must be taken into account during testing, which include the following:

  • Network architecture, including security controls (firewalls, IDS/IPS, and honeypots), and configurations such as load balancers
  • The platform architecture (hardware, operating system, and additional applications) of systems that host web services
  • Applications, middleware, and final-tier databases, which may employ different platforms (Unix or Windows), vendors, programming languages, and a mix of open source, commercial, and proprietary software
  • Authentication and authorization...