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Network Vulnerability Assessment
Network Vulnerability Assessment

Network Vulnerability Assessment: Identify security loopholes in your network's infrastructure

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Network Vulnerability Assessment

Setting Up the Assessment Environment

In the last chapter, we learned about understanding the essentials of a vulnerability management program from a governance perspective. This chapter will introduce various methods and techniques for setting up a comprehensive vulnerability assessment and penetration testing environment. We will learn how to set up our own environment that could be effectively used for various vulnerability assessment techniques discussed later in the book.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Setting up a Kali virtual machine
  • Basics of Kali Linux
  • Environment configuration and setup
  • List of tools to be used during assessment

Setting up a Kali virtual machine

Performing vulnerability assessment or a penetration test involves a series of tasks that need to be performed with the help of multiple tools and utilities. For every task involved in the process, there are tools available, both commercial as well as freeware and open source. It all depends on our choice of tool that suits best as per the context.

For performing an end-to-end assessment, we can either have individual tools downloaded as and when required or we can use a distribution such as Kali Linux that comes with all required tools pre-installed. Kali Linux is a stable, flexible, powerful, and proven platform for penetration testing. It has a baseline of tools that are required to perform various tasks across all phases of penetration testing. It also allows you to easily add tools and utilities that aren't part of the default installation...

Basics of Kali Linux

The default credentials in order to access Kali Linux are username:root and password:toor. However, after the first login, it is important to change the default credentials and set a new password. A new password can be set using the passwd command as shown in the following screenshot:

Kali Linux is comprehensively used for network and application penetration testing. So it is important that Kali Linux is connected to the network as a standalone Kali installation wouldn't be of much use. The first step in ensuring network connectivity is checking whether Kali has a valid IP address. We can use the ifconfig command as shown in the following screenshot and confirm the IP address allocation:

Now that we have changed the default credentials and also affirmed network connectivity, it's now time to check the exact version of our Kali installation. This...

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...

List of tools to be used during assessment

There are tons of tools available for performing various tasks throughout the penetration testing lifecycle. However, the following is a list of tools that are most commonly used during a penetration test:

Sr. no Penetration testing phase Tools
1 Information gathering SPARTA, NMAP, Dmitry, Shodan, Maltego, theHarvester, Recon-ng
2 Enumeration NMAP, Unicornscan
3 Vulnerability assessment OpenVAS, NExpose, Nessus
4 Gaining access

Metasploit, Backdoor-factory, John The Ripper, Hydra

5 Privilege escalation Metasploit
6 Covering tracks Metasploit
7 Web application security testing Nikto, w3af, Burp Suite, ZAP Proxy, SQLmap
8 Reporting KeepNote, Dradis

Summary

In this chapter, we learned that Kali Linux in a virtual environment can be effectively used to perform vulnerability assessment and penetration tests. We also went through some absolute basics about Kali Linux and configure its environment.

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Key benefits

  • Develop a network security threat model for your organization
  • Gain hands-on experience in working with network scanning and analyzing tools
  • Learn to secure your network infrastructure

Description

The tech world has been taken over by digitization to a very large extent, and so it’s become extremely important for an organization to actively design security mechanisms for their network infrastructures. Analyzing vulnerabilities can be one of the best ways to secure your network infrastructure. Network Vulnerability Assessment starts with network security assessment concepts, workflows, and architectures. Then, you will use open source tools to perform both active and passive network scanning. As you make your way through the chapters, you will use these scanning results to analyze and design a threat model for network security. In the concluding chapters, you will dig deeper into concepts such as IP network analysis, Microsoft Services, and mail services. You will also get to grips with various security best practices, which will help you build your network security mechanism. By the end of this book, you will be in a position to build a security framework fit for an organization.

Who is this book for?

Network Vulnerability Assessment is for security analysts, threat analysts, and any security professionals responsible for developing a network threat model for an organization. This book is also for any individual who is or wants to be part of a vulnerability management team and implement an end-to-end robust vulnerability management program.

What you will learn

  • Develop a cost-effective end-to-end vulnerability management program
  • Implement a vulnerability management program from a governance perspective
  • Learn about various standards and frameworks for vulnerability assessments and penetration testing
  • Understand penetration testing with practical learning on various supporting tools and techniques
  • Gain insight into vulnerability scoring and reporting
  • Explore the importance of patching and security hardening
  • Develop metrics to measure the success of the vulnerability management program
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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Aug 31, 2018
Length: 254 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781788627252
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Offensive Security
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Product Details

Publication date : Aug 31, 2018
Length: 254 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781788627252
Vendor :
Offensive Security
Tools :

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Table of Contents

14 Chapters
Vulnerability Management Governance Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Setting Up the Assessment Environment Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Security Assessment Prerequisites Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Information Gathering Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Enumeration and Vulnerability Assessment Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Gaining Network Access Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Assessing Web Application Security Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Privilege Escalation Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Maintaining Access and Clearing Tracks Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Vulnerability Scoring Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Threat Modeling Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Patching and Security Hardening Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Vulnerability Reporting and Metrics Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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Przemyslaw Aug 11, 2020
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Vulnerability Assessment from zero to hero! Very nice book!
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