Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing - Fourth Edition

4

Vulnerability Assessment

The goal of passive and active reconnaissance is to identify an exploitable target, and the goal of vulnerability assessment is to find the security flaws that are most likely to support the tester’s or attacker’s objective (unauthorized access, modification of data, or denial of service). The vulnerability assessment during the exploit phase of the kill chain focuses on creating the access to achieve the objective mapping of the vulnerabilities to line up the exploits and maintain persistent access to the target.

Thousands of exploitable vulnerabilities have been identified, and most are associated with at least one proof-of-concept code file or technique to allow the system to be compromised. Nevertheless, the underlying ...