Book Image

Improving your Penetration Testing Skills

By : Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez, Juned Ahmed Ansari, Daniel Teixeira, Abhinav Singh
Book Image

Improving your Penetration Testing Skills

By: Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez, Juned Ahmed Ansari, Daniel Teixeira, Abhinav Singh

Overview of this book

Penetration testing (or ethical hacking) is a legal and foolproof way to identify vulnerabilities in your system. With thorough penetration testing, you can secure your system against the majority of threats. This Learning Path starts with an in-depth explanation of what hacking and penetration testing are. You’ll gain a deep understanding of classical SQL and command injection flaws, and discover ways to exploit these flaws to secure your system. You'll also learn how to create and customize payloads to evade antivirus software and bypass an organization's defenses. Whether it’s exploiting server vulnerabilities and attacking client systems, or compromising mobile phones and installing backdoors, this Learning Path will guide you through all this and more to strengthen your defense against online attacks. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll have the knowledge and skills you need to invade a system and identify all its vulnerabilities. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt books: • Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux - Third Edition by Juned Ahmed Ansari and Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez • Metasploit Penetration Testing Cookbook - Third Edition by Abhinav Singh , Monika Agarwal, et al.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page

Credential harvesting

During a penetration test, we are not always getting sessions with system or even administrator privileges; most of the time, we will end up with a session from a successful phish which is running with user privileges. That is when credential harvesting comes to our rescue. With credential harvesting, we will try to perform a phishing attack on the target to harvest usernames, passwords, and hashes that can be used to further compromise the organization.

How to do it...

To harvest credentials, we will use the Windows Gather User Credentials post-exploitation module with which we are able to perform a phishing attack on the target by popping up a login prompt.

  1. When the user types his/her credentials into...