What do you get with Print?

Instant access to your digital eBook copy whilst your Print order is Shipped

Paperback book shipped to your preferred address

Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats

Access this title in our online reader with advanced features

DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want

AI Assistant (beta) to help accelerate your learning

Goal-Based Penetration Testing

Everything starts with a goal. In this chapter, we will discuss the importance of goal-based penetration testing with a set of objectives and discuss misconceptions and how a typical vulnerability scan, penetration testing, and red teaming exercise can fail without the importance of a goal. This chapter also provides an overview of security testing and setting up a verification lab and focuses on customizing Kali to support some advanced aspects of penetration testing. By the end of this chapter, you'll have learned the following:

An overview of security testing
Misconceptions of vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, and red teaming exercises
History and purpose of Kali Linux
Updating and organizing Kali
Setting up defined targets
Building a verification lab

Misconceptions of vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, and red team exercises

In this section, we will discuss some misconceptions and limitations on traditional/classical vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, and red teaming exercises. Let's now understand the actual meaning of all of these three in simple terms and their limitations:

Vulnerability scanning (Vscan): It is a process of identifying vulnerabilities or security loopholes in a system or network. One of the misconceptions about Vscan is that it will let you know all of the known vulnerabilities; well, it's not true. Limitations with Vscan are only potential vulnerabilities and it purely depends on the type of scanner that one utilizes; it might also include lots of false positives and, to the business owner, there is no clear vision on whether they are relevant risks or not and which one will be utilized by the attackers first to gain access.
Penetration testing (Pentest): It is a process of safely exploiting vulnerabilities without much impact to the existing network or business. There is a lower number of false positives since the testers will try and simulate the exploit. Limitations with the pentest are only currently known, publicly available exploits and mostly these are project-focused testing. We often hear from pentesters during an assessment, "Yay! Got Root"—but we never question: What's next? This could be due to various reasons, such as the project limits you to report the high-risk issues immediately to the client or the client is interested in only one segment of the network and wants you to test that.

One of the misconceptions about the pentest is that it provides the full attacker view of the network and you are safe once you've done a penetration testing. Well, it isn't the case if attackers found a vulnerability in the business process of your secure app.

Red Team Exercise (RTE): It is a process of evaluating the effectiveness of an organization to defend against cyber threats and improve its security by any possible means; during an RTE, we can notice multiple ways of achieving project objectives and goals, such as complete coverage of activities with the defined project goal, including phishing, wireless, disk drops (USB, CD, and SSD), and physical penetration testing. The limitations with RTEs are time-bound, pre-defined scenarios and an assumed rather than real environment. Often, the RTE is run with a fully monitored mode for every technique and tactics are executed according to the procedure, but this isn't the case when a real attacker wants to achieve an objective.

Often, all three different testing methodologies refer to the term hack or compromise. We will hack your network and show you where your weaknesses are; but wait, does the client or business owner understand the term hack or compromise? How do we measure it? What are the criteria? And when do we know that the hack or compromise is complete? All the questions point to only one thing: what's the primary goal?

Key benefits

Employ advanced pentesting techniques with Kali Linux to build highly secured systems

Discover various stealth techniques to remain undetected and defeat modern infrastructures

Explore red teaming techniques to exploit secured environment

Description

This book takes you, as a tester or security practitioner, through the reconnaissance, vulnerability assessment, exploitation, privilege escalation, and post-exploitation activities used by pentesters. To start with, you'll use a laboratory environment to validate tools and techniques, along with an application that supports a collaborative approach for pentesting. You'll then progress to passive reconnaissance with open source intelligence and active reconnaissance of the external and internal infrastructure. You'll also focus on how to select, use, customize, and interpret the results from different vulnerability scanners, followed by examining specific routes to the target, which include bypassing physical security and the exfiltration of data using a variety of techniques. You'll discover concepts such as social engineering, attacking wireless networks, web services, and embedded devices. Once you are confident with these topics, you'll learn the practical aspects of attacking user client systems by backdooring with fileless techniques, followed by focusing on the most vulnerable part of the network – directly attacking the end user. By the end of this book, you'll have explored approaches for carrying out advanced pentesting in tightly secured environments, understood pentesting and hacking techniques employed on embedded peripheral devices.

Who is this book for?

This third edition of Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing is for you if you are a security analyst, pentester, ethical hacker, IT professional, or security consultant wanting to maximize the success of your infrastructure testing using some of the advanced features of Kali Linux. Prior exposure of penetration testing and ethical hacking basics will be helpful in making the most out of this book.

What you will learn

Configure the most effective Kali Linux tools to test infrastructure security

Employ stealth to avoid detection in the infrastructure being tested

Recognize when stealth attacks are being used against your infrastructure

Exploit networks and data systems using wired and wireless networks as well as web services

Identify and download valuable data from target systems

Maintain access to compromised systems

Use social engineering to compromise the weakest part of the network - the end users

What do you get with Print?