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

PowerShell Empire framework

The initial Empire tool was one of the most powerful post-exploitation tools, which was based on Python 2.7, but progress has been quiet for the last 3 years. The same fork of this project was picked up with active contributions from BC-Security and has now been rewritten in Python 3 and is used by penetration testers around the globe to perform a variety of different attacks in penetration tests to demonstrate system vulnerabilities. This tool runs PowerShell agents that, by nature, are persistent. It also utilizes other important tools, such as mimikatz. In this section, we will look closer at how to use PowerShell’s Empire framework.

This tool can be installed by running sudo apt install powershell-empire in the terminal. Once the application is installed, testers should be able to see the following options:

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Figure 10.33: PowerShell Empire’s main menu

Attackers need to first run the server before connecting the client...