Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing – Fourth Edition - Fourth Edition

By : Vijay Kumar Velu
Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing – Fourth Edition - Fourth Edition

By: Vijay Kumar Velu

Overview of this book

Remote working has given hackers plenty of opportunities as more confidential information is shared over the internet than ever before. In this new edition of Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing, you’ll learn an offensive approach to enhance your penetration testing skills by testing the sophisticated tactics employed by real hackers. You’ll go through laboratory integration to cloud services so that you learn another dimension of exploitation that is typically forgotten during a penetration test. You'll explore different ways of installing and running Kali Linux in a VM and containerized environment and deploying vulnerable cloud services on AWS using containers, exploiting misconfigured S3 buckets to gain access to EC2 instances. This book delves into passive and active reconnaissance, from obtaining user information to large-scale port scanning. Building on this, different vulnerability assessments are explored, including threat modeling. See how hackers use lateral movement, privilege escalation, and command and control (C2) on compromised systems. By the end of this book, you’ll have explored many advanced pentesting approaches and hacking techniques employed on networks, IoT, embedded peripheral devices, and radio frequencies.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
15
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16
Index

The Metasploit Framework

The Metasploit Framework (MSF) is an open-source tool designed to facilitate penetration testing. Written in the Ruby programming language, it uses a modular approach to facilitating exploits during the exploitation phase in cyber kill chain methodology. This makes it easier to develop and code exploits, and it also allows for complex attacks to be easily implemented.

Figure 10.1 depicts an overview of the MSF architecture and components:

Figure 10.1: Metasploit architecture and its components

The framework can be split into three main sections:

  • Libraries
  • Interfaces
  • Modules

Libraries

MSF is built using various functions and libraries and a programming language, such as Ruby. To utilize these functions, penetration testers must understand what these functions are, how to trigger them, what parameters should be passed to the function, and what the expected results are.

All of the libraries are listed in...