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

Using persistent agents

Traditionally, attackers would place a backdoor on a compromised system. If the front door provides authorized access to legitimate users, backdoor applications allow attackers to return to an exploited system and have access to services and data.

Unfortunately, classic backdoors provided limited interactivity and were not designed to be persistent on compromised systems for very long time frames. This was viewed as a significant shortcoming by the attacker community because once the backdoor was discovered and removed, there was additional work required to repeat the compromise steps and exploit the system, which was made even more difficult by forewarned system administrators defending the network and its resources.

Attackers now focus on persistent agents that are properly employed and are more difficult to detect. The first tool we will review is the venerable Netcat.

Employing Netcat as a persistent agent

Netcat is an application that supports...