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

Climbing the ladder with Armitage

Privilege escalation is a funny topic nowadays because the tools at our disposal do so much behind the scenes. It’s easy to take systems for granted when we’re playing with Metasploit and the Armitage frontend. In a Meterpreter session, for example, we can execute getsystem, and often, we get the SYSTEM privilege in a matter of seconds. How is this accomplished so effortlessly? First, we’ll look at a couple of core concepts in Windows: named pipes and security contexts.

Named pipes and security contexts

Yes, you’re right; the word pipe in this context is related to pipelines in the Unix-like world (and, as we covered in Chapter 9, Powershell Fundamentals, pipelines in PowerShell). The pipelines we worked with were unnamed and resided in the shell. The named pipe concept, on the other hand, gives the pipe a name, and by having a name, it utilizes the filesystem so that interaction with it is like interacting...