Penetration testing, also known as ‘pentesting’, is the activity of simulating real attacks to assess the risks associated with potential security breaches. On a pentest, the testers not only try to discover vulnerabilities but also exploit them in order to assess what attackers might gain after a successful exploitation.
This book is a basic introduction to hacking. It is a good source of material to persons starting in the pentesting world or looking for the right tools and approaches used by hackers. It covers the stages of a professional pentesting too.
The book looks oriented to basic training. It introduces quite concepts, ideas and techniques but all this stuff is not covered in depth. The author added some references and good links in place though.
The book is organized along five parts: I The basics, II Assessments, III Attacks, IV Development and V Mobile Hacking. The contents are straight and they are a good overview as a whole.
I found interesting the author’s approach to set up a virtual lab where the reader is able to download vulnerable software in order to exploit it. Some of the tools used in this virtual lab are metasploit, kali, nessus and so on. The book makes a good job explaining step by step the different technical exploitations.
On the other hand I think the book contains too much screenshots. Some of them are not useful (intermediate screens) or they lack of context (screenshots of different applications with frozen values, etc). I think the author could link the project original documentation and save some space and time.
In summary, I think this book will be useful to beginners and readers with a first exposure to pentesting. It makes a good job explaining well-known hacks step-by-step and it offers a good overview of the current scene of pentesting.
I found this book available here:
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