Book Image

Windows and Linux Penetration Testing from Scratch - Second Edition

By : Phil Bramwell
Book Image

Windows and Linux Penetration Testing from Scratch - Second Edition

By: Phil Bramwell

Overview of this book

Let’s be honest—security testing can get repetitive. If you’re ready to break out of the routine and embrace the art of penetration testing, this book will help you to distinguish yourself to your clients. This pen testing book is your guide to learning advanced techniques to attack Windows and Linux environments from the indispensable platform, Kali Linux. You'll work through core network hacking concepts and advanced exploitation techniques that leverage both technical and human factors to maximize success. You’ll also explore how to leverage public resources to learn more about your target, discover potential targets, analyze them, and gain a foothold using a variety of exploitation techniques while dodging defenses like antivirus and firewalls. The book focuses on leveraging target resources, such as PowerShell, to execute powerful and difficult-to-detect attacks. Along the way, you’ll enjoy reading about how these methods work so that you walk away with the necessary knowledge to explain your findings to clients from all backgrounds. Wrapping up with post-exploitation strategies, you’ll be able to go deeper and keep your access. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed in identifying vulnerabilities within your clients’ environments and providing the necessary insight for proper remediation.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Part 1: Recon and Exploitation
9
Part 2: Vulnerability Fundamentals
17
Part 3: Post-Exploitation

Chapter 10: Shellcoding - The Stack

Up to this point, we’ve been working from a fairly high level of abstraction. We’ve reviewed some great tools for getting work done efficiently and learned how to easily generate reports in easy-to-digest formats. Despite this, there is a wall that will halt our progress if we stay above the murky lower layers, and constantly allow tools to hide the underlying machine. Regardless of the task we’re doing, packets and application data eventually work their way down to raw machine data. We learned this earlier while working with networking protocols, such as when a tool tells you that a destination is unreachable. While that may be true, it’s pretty meaningless when you want to know what happened to those bits of information that went flying down the wire. As a security professional, you need to be able to interpret the information at hand, and vague and incomplete data is a daily reality of this field. So, in this...