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Introduction
What this book covers
This book is divided into two parts. In Part 1, The Attacker's Kill Chain, we will follow the steps of a kill chain, analyzing each phase in detail. In Part 2, The Delivery Phase, we will focus on the delivery phase and some of the available methodologies to understand how attacks take place, and how this knowledge can be used to secure a network.
Chapter 1, Starting with Kali Linux, introduces the reader to the fundamentals of Kali Linux, and its optimal configuration to support penetration testing.
Chapter 2, Identifying the Target – Passive Reconnaissance, provides a background on how to gather information about a target using publicly available sources, and the tools that can simplify the reconnaissance and information management.
Chapter 3, Active Reconnaissance and Vulnerability Scanning, introduces the reader to stealthy approaches that can be used to gain information about the target, especially the information that identifies vulnerabilities, which could be exploited.
Chapter 4, Exploit, demonstrates the methodologies that can be used to find and execute exploits that allow a system to be compromised by an attacker.
Chapter 5, Post Exploit – Action on the Objective, describes how attackers can escalate their privileges to achieve their objective for compromising the system, including theft of data, altering data, launching additional attacks, or creating a denial of service.
Chapter 6, Post Exploit – Persistence, provides a background on how to configure a compromised system so that the attacker can return at will and continue post-exploit activities.
Chapter 7, Physical Attacks and Social Engineering, demonstrates why being able to physically access a system or interact with the humans who manage it provides the most successful route to exploitation.
Chapter 8, Exploiting Wireless Communications, demonstrates how to take advantage of common wireless connections to access data networks and isolated systems.
Chapter 9, Reconnaissance and Exploitation of Web-based Applications, provides a brief overview of one of the most complex delivery phases to secure: web-based applications that are exposed to the public Internet.
Chapter 10, Exploiting Remote Access Communications, provides an increasingly important route into systems as more and more organizations adopt distributed and work-from-home models that rely on remote access communications that are themselves vulnerable to attack.
Chapter 11, Client-side Exploitation, focuses on attacks against applications on the end-user's systems, which are frequently not protected to the same degree as the organization's primary network.
Appendix, Installing Kali Linux, provides an overview of how to install Kali Linux, and how to employ a whole-disk encryption to avoid an intercept of confidential testing data.
What you need for this book
In order to practice the material presented in this book, you will need virtualization tools such as VMware or VirtualBox.
You will need to download and configure the Kali Linux operating system and its suite of tools. To ensure that it is up-to-date and that you have all of the tools, you will need access to an Internet connection.
Sadly, not all of the tools on the Kali Linux system will be addressed since there are too many of them. The focus of this book is not to inundate the reader with all of the tools and options, but to provide an approach for testing that will give them the opportunity to learn and incorporate new tools as their experiences and knowledge change over time.
Although most of the examples from this book focus on Microsoft Windows, the methodology and most of the tools are transferrable to other operating systems such as Linux and the other flavors of Unix.
Finally, this book applies Kali to complete the attacker's kill chain against target systems. You will need a target operating system. Many of the examples in the book use Microsoft Windows XP. Although it is deprecated as of April 2014, it provides a "baseline" of standard behavior for many of the tools. If you know how to apply the methodology to one operating system, you can apply it to more recent operating systems such as Windows 7 and Windows 8.
Who this book is for
This book is intended for people who want to know more about data security. In particular, it targets people who want to understand why they use a particular tool when they do, as opposed to those people who throw as many tools as possible at a system to see if an exploit will happen. My goal is for the readers to develop their own method and approach to effective penetration testing, which will allow them to experiment and learn as they progress. I believe that this approach is the only effective way to understand how malicious people attack data systems, and therefore, the only way to understand how to mediate vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.
If you are a security professional, penetration tester, or just have an interest in the security of complex data environments, this book is for you.
