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

Overview of the common escalation methodology

Everything that starts with a methodology offers an approach to a problem solution. In this section, we will go through the common escalation methodology utilized by attackers during a red teaming exercise, or penetration testing.

Figure 12.1 depicts the methodology that can be used:

Diagram  Description automatically generated with low confidence

Figure 12.1: A typical user privilege hierarchy

In line with the cyber kill chain methodology, the actions taken to achieve the objective include escalation of privilege to maintain persistence to the target environment.

The following are the types of user accounts that are found in any target system:

  • Normal user: Typical access through a backdoor run at the level of the user who executes the backdoor. These are the normal users of the system (Windows or Unix) and are either local users or domain users with limited system access to perform only tasks that are allowed for them.
  • Local administrator: Local administrators...