Review: Penetration Testing with the Bash Shell

Today I am going to be reviewing the kindle edition of Penetration Testing with the Bash Shell.

Whilst I am aware of what penetration testing is I can’t say that it is something I have any real expertise in, so I started this book hoping to learn a lot. Unfortunately it didn’t really deliver at all.

The first half of the book is all about finding your way around the bash prompt, at first I was happy to see this since for many readers this could be their first time using a Linux environment.

As the examples became more obscure however and we started learning how to change the colour of our command prompt - I really started to feel like the author had a word count to fill.

Once we got into what seemed like useful content I ran into another issue - Kali, the environment suggested by the author refused to run correctly for me. I have actually written about how I was able to get Kali to finally install for me, but unfortunately I was not able to get Kali to startup once it was installed.

Naturally I can’t blame the book for this, but it does mean that I wasn’t able to try many of the examples.

The book goes on to talk in detail about topics like;

• Using Metasploit
• MAC and ARP abuse
• Brute-forcing Authentication
• Assessing SSL Implementation Security

All great stuff and I hope sometime to be able to run through the examples completely.

Honestly, at the price I wouldn’t recommend this book, the writing wasn’t great, it was very slow to start and I think there is just enough great information available for free online.