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)

Backdooring executable files

Backdooring is a method of bypassing normal security validation and maintaining persistent access to the system. The weakest link in any cyber espionage is the human factor. Attackers would typically utilize the latest known or unknown exploit to embed them into the trusted executable and distribute. In this section, we will deep dive into how one can leverage msfvenom to plant a backdoor in any executable.

msfvenom is a standalone payload generator using Metasploit msfpayload and msfencode. As of June 8, 2015, msfvenom has replaced msfpayload. In order to standardize the tool and make it more efficient for the penetration testers, this tool was introduced. It is installed by default in Kali Linux, and when you type msfvenom -h in the terminal, the following usage details must be displayed:

The following command will create a clone_file...