What this book covers
Chapter 1, Planning and Scoping for a Successful Penetration Test, introduces you to the anatomy of a penetration test. You will learn how to effectively determine the scope of the penetration test as well as where to place your limits, such as when dealing with third-party vendor equipment or environments. Prioritization techniques will also be discussed.
Chapter 2, Advanced Reconnaissance Techniques, will guide you through methods of data collection that will typically avoid setting off alerts. We will focus on various reconnaissance strategies including digging into the deep web and specialty sites to find information about your target.
Chapter 3, Enumeration: Choosing Your Targets Wisely, provides a thorough description of the methods used to perform system footprinting and network enumeration. The goal is to enumerate the environment and to explain what to look for when selecting your targets. This chapter touches upon mid to advanced Nmap techniques and using PBNJ to detect changes on the network. The chapter closes with tips on how to avoid enumeration attempts as well as methods of trying to confuse an attacker (to buy time for the blue team).
Chapter 4, Remote Exploitation, will delve into the Metasploit® framework. We will also describe team based testing with Armitage. We take a look at proof of concept exploit code from Exploit-DB.com which we will rewrite and compile; we also take a look at THC Hydra and John the Ripper for password attacks.
Chapter 5, Web Application Exploitation, has a focus on web application attacks. We will begin by providing step-by-step instructions on how to build a web application exploitation lab and then move toward detailing the usage of w3af and WebScarab. Load balancing is discussed in detail as many environments now have these features. We introduce you to methods of detecting web application firewalls and load balancing with hands-on examples. We finish this chapter with an introduction to the Mantra browser.
Chapter 6, Exploits and Client-Side Attacks, discusses bypassing AV signatures, details the more advanced features of the Social Engineering Toolkit, and goes over the details of buffer overflows and fuzzing.
Chapter 7, Post-Exploitation, describes the activities performed after a successful attack has been completed. We will cover privilege escalation, advanced meterpreter functionality, setting up privileged accounts on different OS types, and cleaning up afterwards to leave a pristine system behind.
Chapter 8, Bypassing Firewalls and Avoiding Detections, covers methods that can be used to attempt to bypass detection while testing. This includes avoiding intrusion detection systems and advanced evasion techniques. We also discuss methods of increasing the detectability of malicious users or applications.
Chapter 9, Data Collection Tools and Reporting, will help you create reports and statistics from all of the data that you have gathered throughout this testing. You will learn how to collect all of the testing data and how to validate results. You will also be walked through generating your report.
Chapter 10, Setting Up Virtual Testing Lab Environments, walks you through setting up a test environment that mimics a corporation that has a multitier DMZ environment using IDS and "some" hardened systems and apps. This includes setting up VBOX, BackTrack, virtual firewalls, IDS and Monitoring.
Chapter 11, Take the Challenge — Putting It All Together, will allow you to gain hands-on experience using the skills you have learned throughout the book. We will set challenges for you that require you to perform a penetration test on your testing environment from start to finish. We will offer step-by-step solutions to the challenges to ensure that the material has been fully absorbed.