Vulnerability scanning
Vulnerability scanning is a crucial phase in an ethical hacking engagement. This phase aims to discover vulnerabilities that could be exploited for you to obtain initial access, elevate your privileges, perform remote code execution, and much more.
Vulnerability scanning tools are useful because of how they can automate all possible security checks, especially across a large number of systems and networks. On the other hand, it is important to understand their limitations:
- These tools only look for known vulnerabilities
- These tools are flat – no intelligence is usually used by threat hackers to understand what is happening in the network thoroughly
There are several vulnerability scanners on the market today, many of which are costly and targeted at enterprises. In this section, we will focus on open source vulnerability scanners that you can run within Kali Linux.
As we have worked with Nmap in the previous section and stated...
