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

Web application hacking methodology

Systematic and goal-oriented penetration testing always starts with the right methodology. Figure 7.1 shows a typical web application hack:

Diagram  Description automatically generated

Figure 7.1: Web application hacking methodology

The methodology is divided into six stages: set target, spider and enumerate, vulnerability scanning, exploitation, cover tracks, and maintain access. These are explained in detail as follows:

  1. Set the target: Setting the right target during a penetration test is very important, as attackers will focus more on specific vulnerable systems to gain system-level access, as per the kill chain method.
  2. Spider and enumerate: At this point, attackers have identified the list of web applications and are digging deeper into specific technology versions and their relevant vulnerabilities. Multiple methods are engaged to spider all the web pages, identify technology, and find everything relevant to advance to the next stage.
  3. Vulnerability...