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

Port, operating system, and service discovery

Kali provides several different tools useful for identifying open ports, operating systems, and installed services on remote hosts. The majority of these functions can be completed using Nmap. Although we will focus on examples using Nmap, the underlying principles apply to the other tools as well.

Port scanning

Port scanning is the process of connecting to TCP and UDP ports to determine what services and applications are running on the target device. In TCP/IP, there are 65,535 ports each for both TCP and UDP on any computer. Some ports are known to be associated with particular services (for instance, TCP 20 and 21 are the usual ports for the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) service).

The first 1,024 are the well-known ports, and most defined services run over ports in this range; accepted services and ports are maintained by IANA (http://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/service-names-port-numbers.xhtml).

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