Book Image

Mastering Defensive Security

By : Cesar Bravo
Book Image

Mastering Defensive Security

By: Cesar Bravo

Overview of this book

Every organization has its own data and digital assets that need to be protected against an ever-growing threat landscape that compromises the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of crucial data. Therefore, it is important to train professionals in the latest defensive security skills and tools to secure them. Mastering Defensive Security provides you with in-depth knowledge of the latest cybersecurity threats along with the best tools and techniques needed to keep your infrastructure secure. The book begins by establishing a strong foundation of cybersecurity concepts and advances to explore the latest security technologies such as Wireshark, Damn Vulnerable Web App (DVWA), Burp Suite, OpenVAS, and Nmap, hardware threats such as a weaponized Raspberry Pi, and hardening techniques for Unix, Windows, web applications, and cloud infrastructures. As you make progress through the chapters, you'll get to grips with several advanced techniques such as malware analysis, security automation, computer forensics, and vulnerability assessment, which will help you to leverage pentesting for security. By the end of this book, you'll have become familiar with creating your own defensive security tools using IoT devices and developed advanced defensive security skills.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1: Mastering Defensive Security Concepts
7
Section 2: Applying Defensive Security
15
Section 3: Deep Dive into Defensive Security

Gathering intelligence about your site/web application

The very first step when securing your web resources (website, web applications, Application Programming Interface (API), and so on) is to determine what kind of information is easily and freely available about them on the internet. If you wonder why you should do this, the response is very simple: because this is what attackers do first!

And believe it or not, there are thousands of web resources exposing sensitive data such as passwords, database users, sensitive documents, and so on.

Importance of public data gathering

Now, let's start by understanding the key aspects that highlight the importance of this activity (and why you must invest time and resources doing it), as follows:

  • Public information can be used on a targeted social engineering attack (phishing, vishing, impersonation, and so on).
  • Usernames can be used to execute targeted password attacks (dictionary attacks, brute-force attacks, and...