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

Exploiting security permission flaws

The following are the most common vulnerabilities within AWS cloud services:

  • Excessive public subnets – The majority of organizations utilize the default VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) feature that is built into AWS and make few changes when they utilize AWS services, taking the easy approach. However, this approach has been proven dangerous in many cases (an example would be botnet-based crypto-ransomware). Public subnets are accessible by anyone on the internet, potentially exposing something that shouldn’t normally be available.
  • IAM (Identity and Access Management) issues in organizations that do not utilize two- or multi-factor authentication for high-privileged accounts and utilize a single account for almost everything, providing the same level of access to all new accounts, putting them at risk. There have been cases where employees’ accounts have been compromised through email phishing leading to massive...