Chapter 1, Introduction, discusses the concept of ethical hacking and also covers basic information about the different fields of penetration testing.
Chapter 2, Setting Up a Lab, looks at setting up a lab and installing all the software that is needed in order to get started with penetration testing. We are going to discuss this because, all through this book, we are going to learn about launching attacks on our system by creating a virtual environment in it.
Chapter 3, Linux Basics, walks you through the Kali Linux environment so that you become familiar with the virtual framework. We will be learning some basic commands, as well as looking at the installation and updating of software.
Chapter 4, Network Penetration Testing, will cover the basics of what we mean by a network and will examine the various types of network. Also, we will discuss a few terminologies related to networks.
Chapter 5, Pre-Connection Attacks, will discuss wireless cards. Then we will learn how to gather information about networks and computers, and we'll learn how to launch attacks, such as controlling connections without having the credentials of the target. We will learn how to capture information about victims by creating fake access points to which the targets will be connected.
Chapter 6, Network Penetration Testing – Gaining Access, demonstrates how we can crack the key and gain access to our target by using all the information that we have gathered about the victim. This chapter we will also teach you how to crack WEP/WPA/WPA2 encryptions.
Chapter 7, Post-Connection Attacks, will teach you how to gather information about the network so that we can use it to perform further powerful attacks. To do so, we will be using various tools. Each of those tools has various advantages that we can exploit to find out more useful information about the victims.
Chapter 8, Man-in-the-Middle Attacks, will be about launching various man-in-the-middle attacks, such as ARP spoofing, session hijacking, and DNS spoofing. We will also learn about the Wireshark tool, which is incredibly effective for analyzing the packets flowing in and out of the victim's system.
Chapter 9, Network Penetration Testing, Detection, and Security, discusses ARP poisoning—we will discuss how to perform the attack, how to detect it, and also how to prevent and secure our systems from this attack. We will also be learning about how Wireshark can help us with all those endeavors.
Chapter 10, Gaining Access to Computer Devices, teaches us how to gain full control over any computer system. This chapter will cover the first approach, which is server-side attacks. In this chapter, we will learn how to gain full access to the target system without user intervention. We will even be gathering information about the operating system of the victim, as well as any open ports and installed services that might help us identify the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of that system. Then we will be exploiting the vulnerabilities to control the target.
Chapter 11, Scanning Vulnerabilities Using Tools, will show you how to use the built-in Metasploit framework to help us to scan the network and target so that we can gain information about them.
Chapter 12, Client-Side Attacks, looks at the second approach that can be used to gain access to the victim's system. Here, we will be making use of packets that move in and out of the target system to launch attacks. To track packets, we will learn about a tool called Veil, which even helps us generate backdoors. We'll also look at securing our system.
Chapter 13, Client-Side Attacks – Social Engineering, teaches you how to access the victim's systems when vulnerabilities are not apparent. In such cases, our only solution is interacting with the user, and that is where social engineering comes into play. We will be using various techniques to get the victim to install a backdoor to their device. To achieve this, we will be creating fake updates and backdooring downloaded files on the fly.
Chapter 14, Attacking and Detecting Trojans with BeEF, teaches us how to use the BeEF tool. We will learn some basic commands with it, and we'll use it to detect Trojans.
Chapter 15, Attacks Outside the Local Network, demonstrates the attacks that we will be launching on other networks. We will be learning about the concept of IP forwarding, and we'll also look at using external backdoors to launch these attacks.
Chapter 16, Post Exploitation, teaches you how to interact with a system that you've managed to break into. We will study how to maintain our access to the system (and filesystem) that we have hacked. We will also learn how to use the target computer to hack or spy on the other computers in the network.
Chapter 17, Website Penetration Testing, discusses how websites work, and we will even look at how the backend is exploited.
Chapter 18, Website Pentesting – Information Gathering, explains how we can gather information about our target, specifically website owners or servers hosting those websites. We can do this using commands and tools such as Netcraft. We will also be covering the concept of the subdomain.
Chapter 19, File Upload, Code Execution, and File Inclusion Vulnerabilities, deals with various vulnerabilities and also demonstrates, via examples, how to exploit them.
Chapter 20, SQL Injection Vulnerabilities, covers one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities, which is SQL injections. Here we will also learn about how we can detect such vulnerabilities and secure our systems from them.
Chapter 21, Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities, covers cross-site scripting. Here we will learn about everything from launching attacks to securing your systems from those attacks. Furthermore, we'll also find out how we can detect those threats in our system.
Chapter 22, Discovering Vulnerabilities Automatically Using OWASP ZAP, teaches you how to use a tool called Zmap, which helps detect risks. It generates results of various scans, and we'll be analyzing those results in this chapter.