Book Image

Learn Penetration Testing

By : Rishalin Pillay
Book Image

Learn Penetration Testing

By: Rishalin Pillay

Overview of this book

Sending information via the internet is not entirely private, as evidenced by the rise in hacking, malware attacks, and security threats. With the help of this book, you'll learn crucial penetration testing techniques to help you evaluate enterprise defenses. You'll start by understanding each stage of pentesting and deploying target virtual machines, including Linux and Windows. Next, the book will guide you through performing intermediate penetration testing in a controlled environment. With the help of practical use cases, you'll also be able to implement your learning in real-world scenarios. By studying everything from setting up your lab, information gathering and password attacks, through to social engineering and post exploitation, you'll be able to successfully overcome security threats. The book will even help you leverage the best tools, such as Kali Linux, Metasploit, Burp Suite, and other open source pentesting tools to perform these techniques. Toward the later chapters, you'll focus on best practices to quickly resolve security threats. By the end of this book, you'll be well versed with various penetration testing techniques so as to be able to tackle security threats effectively
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: The Basics
4
Section 2: Exploitation
12
Section 3: Post Exploitation
16
Section 4: Putting It All Together

Attacking web applications

As a penetration tester, you shouldn't rely solely on tools that can be used for web application attacks. Being well-versed about them will certainly help during your penetration test as you may be pressed for time.

In this section, we will discuss various tools and look at how to use them to perform attacks against various web applications.

Nikto

Nikto is a web server scanner that is included with Kali Linux by default. It is able to extract or identify information such as the following:

  • Server version
  • Potentially dangerous programs or files
  • Server configuration items
  • Installed web servers

Some of the main features of Nikto are as follows:

  • Support for SSL
  • HTTP proxy support
  • Ability to scan...