If you are a penetration tester, IT professional, or security consultant wanting to maximize the success of your network testing by using some of the advanced features of Kali Linux, then this book is for you. Some prior exposure to the basics of penetration testing and ethical hacking would be helpful in making the most out of this title.

Chapter 1, Goal-Based Penetration Testing with Kali Linux, introduces a functional outline, based on the penetration-testing methodology, that will be used throughout the book. It ensures that a coherent and comprehensive approach to penetration testing will be followed.

Chapter 2, Open Source Intelligence and Passive Reconnaissance, provides background on how to gather information about a target using publicly-available sources, and discusses the tools that can simplify reconnaissance and information management.

Chapter 3, Active Reconnaissance of the External and Internal Networks, introduces you to stealthy approaches that can be used to gain information about the target, especially the information that identifies vulnerabilities to be exploited.

Chapter 4, Vulnerability Assessment, teaches you the semi-automated process of scanning a network and its devices to locate systems that are vulnerable to attack and compromise, and the process of taking all reconnaissance and vulnerability scan information, assessing it, and then creating a map to guide the penetration-testing process.

Chapter 5, Advanced Social Engineering and Physical Security, demonstrates why being able to physically access a system or interact with the humans who manage it provides the most successful route to exploitation.

Chapter 6, Wireless Attacks, provides a brief explanation of wireless technologies, and focuses instead on the common techniques used to compromise these networks by bypassing security.

Chapter 7, Exploiting Web-Based Applications, provides a brief overview of one of the most complex delivery phases to secure: web-based applications that are exposed to the public internet.

Chapter 8, Client-Side Exploitation, focuses on attacks against applications on the end user's systems, which are frequently not protected to the same degree as the organization's primary network.

Chapter 9, Bypassing Security Controls, demonstrates the most common security controls in place, identifies a systematic process for overcoming these controls, and demonstrates this using the tools from the Kali toolset.

Chapter 10, Exploitation, demonstrates the methodologies that can be used to find and execute exploits that allow a system to be compromised by an attacker.

Chapter 11, Action on the Objective, focuses on the immediate post-exploit activities, as well as the concept of horizontal escalation—the process of using an exploited system as a starting point to jump off to other systems on the network.

Chapter 12, Privilege Escalation, demonstrates how the penetration tester can own all aspects of a system's operations, and more importantly, how obtaining some access privileges will allow the tester to control all systems across a network.

Chapter 13, Command and Control, focuses on what a modern attacker would do to enable data to be exfiltrated to the attacker's location, while hiding the evidence of the attack.

Chapter 14, Embedded Devices and RFID Hacking, focuses on what a modern attacker would do to perform a structured attack on embedded devices, as well as the cloning of NFC cards, to achieve an objective.

In order to practice the material presented in this book, you will need virtualization tools such as VMware or VirtualBox.

You will need to download and configure the Kali Linux operating system and its suite of tools. To ensure that it is up to date and that you have all of the tools, you will need an internet connection.

Sadly, not all of the tools on the Kali Linux system will be addressed, since there are just too many of them. The focus of this book is not to overwhelm you with all of the tools and options, but to provide an approach for testing that will give you the opportunity to learn and incorporate new tools as your experiences and knowledge increases over time.

Although most of the examples from this book focus on Microsoft Windows, the methodology and most of the tools are transferable to other operating systems, such as Linux and the other flavors of Unix.

Finally, this book applies Kali to complete the attacker's kill-chain against target systems. For this, you will need a target operating system. Many of the examples in the book use Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2.

<!DOCTYPE foo [ <!ENTITY Variable "hello" > ]><somexml><message>&Variable;</message></somexml>

chmod 600 privatekey.pem
ssh -i privatekey.pem ec2-user@amazon-dns-ip

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The information within this book is intended to be used only in an ethical manner. Do not use any information from the book to perform illegal activities if you do not have written permission from the owner of the equipment. If you perform illegal actions, you are likely to be arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Packt Publishing does not take any responsibility if you misuse any of the information contained within the book. The information herein must only be used while testing environments with proper written authorizations from appropriate persons responsible.

The features explained in the book are based on the meta-packages version of Kali Linux 2019.1, this is not the official release by Offensive Security.