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)

Attacking a system using hostile scripts


Client-side scripts, such as JavaScript, VBScript, and PowerShell, were developed to move the application logic and actions from the server to the client's computer. From an attacker's or tester's perspective, there are several advantages of using these scripts, as follows:

  • The majority of the .com websites use one or the other JavaScript—with jQuery being one of them—as major deployments across the globe.
  • They're already part of the target's natural operating environment; the attacker does not have to transfer large compilers or other helper files such as encryption applications to the target system.
  • Scripting languages are designed to facilitate computer operations such as configuration management and system administration. For example, they can be used to discover and alter system configurations, access the registry, execute programs, access network services and databases, and move binary files via HTTP or email. Such standard scripted operations...