Kali Linux 101

Linux was always a bit too 'geeky' thing for me. My recent time on bench provided me however with time and motivation to go into this "terra incognita".
The intention was originally to learn some foundations of security testing. After a while I discovered that Kali Linux could provide also benefits for the everyday testing routine.

Following is a simple set of tools that will support and enhance your testing.

whatweb

Whatweb is a web scanner which provides information about the technologies used on the website, mail addresses found and many more

Example (type into terminal in Kali Linux): whatweb 0-v https://www.houseoftest.rocks/

whois 

Provides domain and legal information about the target website (where is it registered, owner, address, etc.)
Example: whois houseoftest.rocks

cewl

Outputs all the words contained in the target website. You never know when such feature comes handy. You can output also into a file of course.

Example: cewl https://www.houseoftest.rocks/ -v -w wordlist_hot.txt

theharvester

Searches and outputs mentions on social medias about specified word (for example name of your company). This is rather a tool used in penetration testing, however other forms of testing can also find usage. 

Example: theharvester -d houseoftest -b twitter 

(-b defines the data source, you can put there  google, googleCSE, bing, bingapi, pgp, linkedin, google-profiles, jigsaw, twitter, googleplus, all)

zap

OWASP ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy) is a GUI penetration testing tool devised to find vulnerabilities in a website/application. On the surface level it can be also used by a person which is not at all familiar with penetration testing. Some features of zap have very good (time investment)/(information gained) ratio. The configuration is relatively quick, you need to set the proxy both in your browser and in zap and let your browser accept the certificate which you create in zap. Among many uses of this tool to enhance your testing:

Attack

In this feature of zap you just type in your target and click "attack", it will handel the rest, you just need to correctly interpret the results

There are of course many adjustments and tweaks to this scan which you can further play with.

Testing with zap in background

When you run zap configured with your browser, it intercepts and stored all requests/responses going between the website and your browser. When you run this in background, it maps places of the website behind which the automatic scan cannot pass (logins etc.). You can get valuable information about possible flaws or vulnerabilities through this.

Fuzzing

If you were ever interested how that one particular search bar would react to XY different random or custom inputs, fuzzing can spare you some time. 

Start the fuzzer and observe the results

The fuzzer currently found no problems with the current payloads, however the sky is the limit with the prepared file fuzzers within zap or freely downloadable from internet.

Conclusion

Tester as every craftsman is greatly supported by its tools, even an expert lumberjack cannot effectively cut a tree with an blunt axe. Kali is a very sharp axe, but you need some practice to use even a fraction of its potential. I say go this way and explore.