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

Application-specific attacks

Application-specific attacks outnumber attacks against specific operating systems. When you consider the misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and logic errors that can affect each online application, it is surprising that any application can be considered secure.

We will highlight some of the more important attacks against web services.

Brute-forcing access credentials

One of the most common initial attacks against a website or its services is a brute-force attack against access authentication, guessing the username and password. This attack has a high success rate because users tend to select easy-to-remember credentials or reuse credentials, and also because system administrators frequently don’t control multiple access attempts.

Kali comes with hydra, a command-line tool, and hydra-gtk, which has a GUI interface. Both tools allow a tester to brute-force or iterate possible usernames and passwords against a specified service. Multiple...