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

Sneaking your data in – hash length extension attacks

As you may recall from our brief introduction to hashes in Chapter 4, Windows Passwords on the Network, hashing isn’t encryption. An encrypted message can be decrypted into a readable message. A cryptographic hash, on the other hand, has no plaintext representation; it cannot be reversed. However, a particular input sent through a particular hashing algorithm will always result in the same hash output (called a one-way function). This makes hashing algorithms useful for integrity checks, as even a slight change to the input produces a radically different hash output. However, let’s consider the fact that a hash’s output is a fixed length, regardless of the message being hashed; for long messages, the hash function is done in rounds on blocks of message data, over and over until the entire message is hashed.

With the result depending on all of the previous inputs, we could – in theory ...