Working with wireless adapters

As an aspiring ethical hacking and penetration tester, you may be assigned to perform wireless penetration testing techniques on a targeted network with the intent of identifying any security vulnerabilities and assessing the attack surface to better understand how an adversary may be able to compromise the wireless network of an organization and gain unauthorized access.While many ethical hackers and penetration testers prefer to directly install Kali Linux on the local storage drive on their laptops for improve mobility and direct access to the hardware resources, this deployment model isn’t always the best. For instance, the chipset within the wireless network adapter on a laptop may not support monitoring mode and packet injection.

• Therefore, it’s recommended to acquire a set of external wireless networks adapters that supports the following features:
  IEEE 802.11 standards such as 802.11a/b/g/n/ac.
• Operates on the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands...

Managing and monitoring wireless modes

As an ethical hacker and penetration tester, it’s important to have a clear understanding of the various operating modes of a wireless network adapter. Let’s take a look at each operating mode for wireless network adapters:

• Managed – This is the default operating mode for all wireless network adapters. This mode enables a host device such as computer to connect to a nearby access point or wireless router. However, this mode does not enable ethical hackers and penetration tester to perform any type of wireless penetration testing techniques on a targeted wireless network.
• Monitor – This operating mode enables ethical hackers and penetration tester to scan for IEEE 802.11 wireless networks within the vicinity, capture wireless frames such as beacons from access points and probes from wireless clients, and enables you to perform packet inject attacks on a targeted wireless network.
• Master – This mode enables Linux...

Summary

Having completed this chapter, you have learnt about the importance of network penetration testing and how it helps organizations to improve their cyber defensive and strategies to prevent future cyber-attacks and threats. In addition, you have discovered how to setup and work with both bind and reverse shell between different systems over a network. Furthermore, you have exploited how to setup wireless network adapters for performing wireless penetration testing in later chapters.I trust that the knowledge presented in this chapter has provided you with valuable insights, supporting your path towards becoming an ethical hacker and penetration tester in the dynamic field of cybersecurity. May this newfound understanding empower you in your journey, allowing you to navigate the industry with confidence and make a significant impact. In the next chapter, Performing Network Penetration Testing, you will learn how to perform network penetration testing to identify security vulnerabilities...

Further Reading

• To learn about Aircrack-ng, go to: https://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=Main.

Identifying and exploiting vulnerable services

In this section, you will learn how to use various techniques and tools within Kali Linux. These will help you efficiently identify and exploit security vulnerabilities found on both Windows and Linux-based operating systems that have vulnerable applications and network services running on them.

Exploiting Linux-based systems

In this section, you will learn how to discover and exploit the low-hanging fruits, which are easy-to-exploit security vulnerabilities on a targeted system, with the intention to compromise and gain unauthorized access to the target. The low-hanging fruits are simply the security vulnerabilities that are easier to compromise, use fewer resources, and are not complex. In the following exercise, you will learn how to identify a security vulnerability within the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) service on the targeted Linux-based system.

To get started with this exercise, please use the following instructions...

Summary

In this chapter, you have learned how to perform network-based penetration testing, from discovering profile systems on an organization’s network to discovering and exploiting various common network protocols and security vulnerabilities on host systems. Furthermore, you learned about various password-based attacks, how to pass the password hashes of users across the network, and how to gain access to host systems without needing to crack a user’s password.

I trust that the knowledge presented in this chapter has provided you with valuable insights, supporting your path toward becoming an ethical hacker and penetration tester in the dynamic field of cybersecurity. May this newfound understanding empower you in your journey, allowing you to navigate the industry with confidence and make a significant impact. In the next chapter, Chapter 10, Post-Exploitation Techniques, you will learn how to expand your foothold on a compromised system.

Further reading

• SANS cheat sheets – https://www.sans.org/blog/the-ultimate-list-of-sans-cheat-sheets/
• Credential access – https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0006/

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