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 Windows operating system controls


In every corporate environment, we see all the endpoints provided to the users use the Windows operating system. The likelihood of exploiting Windows is always high due to the usage. In this section, we will focus on some of the specific Windows operating system security controls and how to bypass them post access to the endpoint.

User Account Control (UAC)

Recent developments show there are 52 different ways to bypass Windows UAC, which can be found at https://github.com/hfiref0x/UACME. This project is primarily focused on reverse engineering malware. All the source code is written in C# and C; this will require attackers to compile the code and then perform the informed attacks.

Microsoft introduced security controls to restrict processes from running at three different integrity levels: high, medium, and low. A high integrity process has administrator rights, a medium-level process runs with a standard user's rights, and a low integrity process...