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

Setting Up Your Lab with Kali Linux

Preparation is the key to everything; it becomes even more important when working on a penetration testing project, where you get a limited amount of time for reconnaissance, scanning, and exploitation. Eventually, you can gain access and present a detailed report to the customer. Each penetration test that you conduct will be different in nature and may require a different approach from the tests that you conducted earlier. Tools play a major role in penetration testing. So, you need to prepare your toolkit beforehand and have hands-on experience with all of the tools that you will need to execute the test.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • An overview of Kali Linux and changes from the previous version
  • The different ways of installing Kali Linux
  • Virtualization versus installation on physical hardware
  • A walk-through and configuration...