Penetration testing is a legal and authorized attempt to exploit computer systems for the purpose of making the computer systems more secure. This Backtrack Penetration Testing Tutorial is a penetration testing tutorial using Backtrack Linux. Backtrack is the best penetration testing distribution. Offers some penetration testing programs and these programs will used in this Backtrack Penetration Testing Tutorial. The results of penetration testing are addressing the vulnerabilities in the computer system and also particular recommendations for fixing the vulnerabilities. Penetration testing is used to protect the computer systems and networks from attackers (Black Hat Hacker).

Requirement
You need a place to practice this Backtrack Penetration Testing Tutorial. Virtual Lab is the solutions. You can make a network in your own computer without “real computer”. With virtual lab you can practice without harming other computer systems. Virtual Machine is the solution. With Virtual Machine you can install OS under your OS, in other words you can use multiple OS in the same time and in the same machine.

There are some Virtualization software, for example VirtualBox and VMware. But I recommended VirtualBox for this Backtrack Penetration Testing Tutorial. You can install VirtualBox on your Backtrack for free because VirtualBox is an Open Source software.

Backtrack Penetration Testing Tutorial

Step 1 : Information Gathering
The first step of Backtrack Penetration Testing Tutorial is Information Gathering. Gathering all of the information from the web about victim. If your victim has a website you can gather all of the victim’s personal information in his domain name of the website. You can read information gathering using domain name.

Not only that, you also can grab the website and make it offline website in your computer so you can access locally and identify the website. HTTrack is tool that can copy a website page-by-page and we will use it in this Backtrack Penetration Testing Tutorial. With HTTrack you can make off-line copy of the victim’s website.

Installing HTTrack is easy. Open your terminal and install it by type :
apt-get install httrack

Open your HTTrack using terminal and enter your project name, base part (a path where you want to save the offline copy of the website), and URL (site that you want to copy). Wait for a moment and you will get offline copy of the site.

Now lets collect another information using The Harvester. The Harvester is a Python script that allows to collect email addresses or subdomains that related to the victim’s website and we will use it in this Backtrack Penetration Testing Tutorial. This Christian Martorella’s script will use Google and Bing when looking for emails, hosts, or subdomain of the victim’s website.

cd /pentest/enumeration/theharvester

./theHarvester.py -d victimwebsite.com -l 10 -b google.com

Step 2 : Scanning
Scanning the port of systems and the vulnerabilities is the next step of Backtrack Penetration Testing Tutorial. Scanning port is important because port is a location where software and hardware communicate in the networks. Port allows a computer to exchange information with other computers, softwares, or also devices.

Common Ports and Services
Port     Service
20        FTP data transfer
21        FTP control
22        SSH
23        Telnet
25        SMTP (e-mail)
53        DNS
80        HTTP
443      HTTPS

Ping
Ping is a network tool used to test the reachability of a host on an Internet Protocol (IP) network and to measure the round-trip time for messages sent to a destination computer. (Wikipedia)

Port Scanning
Ports can be either TCP or UDP and there are 65.536 (0–65.535) ports on every computer. The purpose of scanning ports is to know the “open” port. So we can know what services used in the server.

Nmap is the most popular port scanning tool and we will use it in this Backtrack Penetration Testing Tutorial. It is open source and build by default in the Backtrack. You can read my post about Basic usage of Nmap. Nmap is very important tool in the network security. The simple way using nmap is :
nmap -p- IP

Vulnerabilities Scanning
The purpose of vulnerabilities scanning is looking for vulnerabilities of the system so we can attack it with the suitable exploit. We need tool to scan systems for vulnerabilities, the vulnerability scanner called Nessus. We will use Nessus in this Backtrack Penetration Testing Tutorial. You can install Nessus on Backtrack and lets scan the vulnerabilities.

Step 3 : Exploitation
This is the final step of Backtrack Penetration Testing Tutorial. Exploitation can be launch with Exploitation Tools. You can use Metasploit or Medusa. Read my post about Exploiting with Metasploit if you want to use Metasploit. But no we will use Medusa.

Medusa is brute force tool that attempts to gain access to remote services (FTP, HTTP, MySQL, Telnet, VNC, Web Form, and more). Before using Medusa we need some required things. We need IP target, username list, and password dictionary.

Backtrack includes a word lists that you can use for brute forcing. We can find it at /pentest/passwords/wordlists/

In order to using Medusa for brute-force attack, you can open terminal and type the following command:
medusa –h target_ip –u username –P path_to_password_dictionary –M service_to_attack

I think this is a simple Backtrack Penetration Testing Tutorial. If you have any ideas you can write the comment below. Hope this Backtrack Penetration Testing Tutorial help you.

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