Environment configuration and setup

While our basic Kali setup is up and running, we also need to install and configure some additional services that we might need during our assessment. In the upcoming sections, we will discuss a few such useful services in Kali Linux.

Web server

A web server is going to be of help to us during the exploitation phase, wherein we may need to host a backdoor executable. The Apache web server is installed by default in Kali Linux. We can start the Apache web server using the service apache2 start command, as shown in the following screenshot.

We can verify whether the service started successfully  by using the netstat -an | grep ::80 command: 

Now that the Apache server is up and running, we can verify it through the browser as well. By hitting the localhost (127.0.0.1), we are able to see the default Apache web page as shown in the following screenshot:

If we want to change the default page or if we wish to host any files, we can do so by placing the required...