Chapter 6: Performing Vulnerability Assessments

As you have learned so far, the information-gathering phase is vital for later phases of penetration testing as a cybersecurity professional. Discovering security vulnerabilities means having to focus on understanding the attack surface of your target. The attack surface is defined as all the points of entry into a system or network that a threat actor, such as a hacker, can exploit and compromise the system based on the number of security vulnerabilities that exist. As an aspiring ethical hacker and penetration tester, understanding the number of security flaws and their level of severity can help you understand which systems are easier to compromise on a network than others.

In this chapter, you will learn how to use Kali Linux with various popular tools to perform a vulnerability assessment on a network. You will start by learning how to install, perform, and analyze scan results using Nessus, one of the most popular and industry...