My ethical hacks

Nikto is a free software command-line scanner for finding the vulnerabilities (ex. dangerous files/CGIs, outdated server software) on webservers.

You can scan by adding URL or IP:

See the documentation for a full list of major features and how to use them.

Here you can find some of them:

SSL Support (Unix with OpenSSL or maybe Windows with ActiveState's Perl/NetSSL)

Full HTTP proxy support

Checks for outdated server components

Save reports in plain text, XML, HTML, NBE or CSV

Template engine to easily customize reports

Scan multiple ports on a server, or multiple servers via input file (including nmap output)

LibWhisker's IDS encoding techniques

Easily updated via command line

Identifies installed software via headers, favicons and files

Host authentication with Basic and NTLM

Subdomain guessing

Apache and cgiwrap username enumeration

Mutation techniques to "fish" for content on web servers

Scan tuning to include or exclude entire classes of vulnerability checks

Guess credentials for authorization realms (including many default id/pw combos)

Authorization guessing handles any directory, not just the root directory

Enhanced false positive reduction via multiple methods: headers, page content, and content hashing

Reports "unusual" headers seen

Interactive status, pause and changes to verbosity settings

Save full request/response for positive tests

Replay saved positive requests

Maximum execution time per target

Auto-pause at a specified time

Checks for common "parking" sites

Logging to Metasploit

Thorough documentation

Also, it is important to know that web scanners can give some false positives. Therefore, you need to check detected threats manually :

Remember that it might be illegal to use this toll if you don’t have the owner’s permission to do it.

More:

https://tools.kali.org/information-gathering/nikto

*As I am still learning, feel free to contact me if you find any mistakes (hope not!) :)

**Also, if you want to learn a lot about pentesting (and can speak Polish^^) i highly recommend you courses here: https://szkolasecurity.pl/ 

Kali Linux

Kali Linux is a Debian-based Linux with tools for Penetration Testing and Security Auditing.

To get it on your system, first you need to download Virtual Box and Kali Linux Virtual Images. 

<when you download it, you can clone it so that you have two machines you can work with while testing>

if there is an error while trying to start Kali Linux for the first time -> you need to disable USB controller in the settings

network: to make the 2 machines “see each other” add a NAT Network in the Global Settings and then choose it in both machines.

the default login and password is “kali” :)

Useful commands in the terminal: 

ls -al: lists the files 

su: switch to the superuser

su user_name: switches the user

su - user_name: switches the user with a login interface similar to when you are logging on normally

whoami: displays user, group and privileges information for the logged in user.

last: shows the last logins in the system

who: shows who is logged in to the system

ip a: checking the ip address.                                                              

pwd: displays the current directory file path                                               

rm file_name: removes a file

cd: change directory to $HOME 

cd ..: moves up op one level in the directory

updatedb: updating local db

locate file_name: locates a file in the local db (first better to update it using updatedb)

which: searches through the directories that are defined in the $PATH environment variable for a given filename; returns a path name

Some more useful commands: 

More:

https://www.kali.org/docs/introduction/what-is-kali-linux/

https://www.yeahhub.com/top-20-basic-kali-linux-commands/

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/difference-between-locate-which-and-find-command-in-linux/

Let's see how it goes! Security issues and ethical hacking has always been close to my heart.

As I have started learning ethical hacking and performing my first pentests I decided to create a place where I can somehow sum everything up and maybe be some help for other learners!