Book Image

Mastering Defensive Security

By : Cesar Bravo
Book Image

Mastering Defensive Security

By: Cesar Bravo

Overview of this book

Every organization has its own data and digital assets that need to be protected against an ever-growing threat landscape that compromises the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of crucial data. Therefore, it is important to train professionals in the latest defensive security skills and tools to secure them. Mastering Defensive Security provides you with in-depth knowledge of the latest cybersecurity threats along with the best tools and techniques needed to keep your infrastructure secure. The book begins by establishing a strong foundation of cybersecurity concepts and advances to explore the latest security technologies such as Wireshark, Damn Vulnerable Web App (DVWA), Burp Suite, OpenVAS, and Nmap, hardware threats such as a weaponized Raspberry Pi, and hardening techniques for Unix, Windows, web applications, and cloud infrastructures. As you make progress through the chapters, you'll get to grips with several advanced techniques such as malware analysis, security automation, computer forensics, and vulnerability assessment, which will help you to leverage pentesting for security. By the end of this book, you'll have become familiar with creating your own defensive security tools using IoT devices and developed advanced defensive security skills.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1: Mastering Defensive Security Concepts
7
Section 2: Applying Defensive Security
15
Section 3: Deep Dive into Defensive Security

Using a vulnerability assessment scanner (OpenVAS)

OpenVAS is the most famous open source vulnerability scanner available.

The software is mainly maintained as an open source project by Greenbone networks (www.greenbone.net) as part of their commercial suite of a vulnerability management solution.

This software is capable of testing an entire network to discover devices and then execute a plurality of actions to determine the Operating System (OS), ports, configurations, and software installed on the systems, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 13.4 – OpenVAS network scan structure

After that, OpenVAS can execute several checks to identify vulnerabilities on each of the identified components.

Authenticated tests

Part of the powerful options of OpenVAS is the capability to perform two types of tests: unauthenticated and authenticated testing.

An unauthenticated test is less invasive because it just tests general vulnerabilities...