Black Hat Bash

Bash Scripting for Hackers and Pentesters

by Dolev Farhi, Nick Aleks

Fall 2024, 336 pp.

ISBN-13:

9781718503748

Bash is one of the first building blocks that expert penetration testers learn. But every hacker, regardless of experience level, should know their way around a bash shell—its powerful scripting language lets you scale your attacks and write your own tools when others aren’t available. Black Hat Bash will teach you how to harness this essential pentesting skill set through hands-on exercises that use bash scripting to chain commands together, automate critical tasks, craft successful living-off-the-land attacks, and more.

Early chapters cover the bash scripting language’s syntax and help you set up a lab environment to test your newfound bash abilities during all stages of the penetration testing process. You’ll soon be automating reconnaissance tasks, performing OS command injection, parsing tool output to extract important information, and maneuvering a restricted network using bash techniques that make your offensive engagements more efficient.

This book makes bash easy to learn. And, with its focus on presenting bash in the context of pentesting, you’ll not only learn the language but you’ll also pick up lots of hacking tricks that allow you to use bash right away as your go-to offensive security tool.

Author Bio

Dolev Farhi is a security engineer and author with extensive experience leading security engineering teams in complex environments and scale in the Fintech and cyber security industries. Currently, he is the Principal Security Engineer at Wealthsimple, building defenses for one of the fastest Fintech companies in North America. Dolev has previously worked for several security firms and provided training for official Linux certification tracks. He is one of the founders of DEFCON Toronto (DC416), a popular Toronto-based hacker group. In his spare time, he enjoys researching vulnerabilities in IoT devices, participating and building CTF challenges and contributing exploits to Exploit-DB.

Nick Aleks is a leader in Toronto's cybersecurity community and a distinguished and patented security engineer, speaker, and researcher. He is currently the Senior Director of Security at Wealthsimple, leads his own security firm, ASEC.IO, and is a Senior Advisory Board member for HackStudent, George Brown, and the University of Guelph’s Master of Cybersecurity and Threat Intelligence programs. A founder of DEFCON Toronto, he specializes in offensive security and penetration testing and has over 10 years of experience hacking everything from websites, safes, locks, cars, drones, and even smart buildings.

Table of contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Bash Basics
Chapter 2: Flow Control and Text Processing
Chapter 3: Setting Up a Hacking Lab
Chapter 4: Reconnaissance
Chapter 5: Vulnerability Scanning and Fuzzing
Chapter 6: Web Shells and Command Injection
Chapter 7: Reverse Shells
Chapter 8: Internal Information Gathering
Chapter 9: Privilege Escalation
Chapter 10: Persistence
Chapter 11: Network Probing and Lateral Movement
Chapter 12: Exfiltration and Defense Evasion
Index

The chapters in red are included in this Early Access PDF.