Ali Shakeel - BackTrack 4: assuring security by penetration testing: master the art of penetration testing with BackTrack

Shakeel Ali is the main founder and CTO of Cipher Storm Ltd, UK. His expertise in the security industry markedly exceeds the standard number of security assessments, audits, compliance, governance, and forensic projects that he carries in day-to-day operations. He has also served as a Chief Security Officer at CSS-Providers S.A.L. As a senior security evangelist and having spent endless nights without taking a nap, he provides constant security support to various businesses, educational organizations, and government institutions globally. He is an active independent researcher who writes various articles and whitepapers, and manages a blog at Ethical-Hacker.net. He also regularly participates in BugCon Security Conferences held in Mexico, to highlight the best-of-breed cyber security threats and their solutions from practically driven countermeasures.

I would like to thank all my friends, reviewers, and colleagues who were cordially involved in this book project. Special thanks to the entire Packt Publishing team, and their technical editors and reviewers who have given invaluable comments, suggestions, feedback, and support to make this project successful. I also want to thank Tedi Heriyanto (co-author) whose continual dedication, contributions, ideas, and technical discussions led to produce the useful product you see today. Last but not least, thanks to my pals from past and present with whom the sudden discovery never ends, and whose vigilant eyes turn an IT industry into a secure and stable environment.

Tedi Heriyanto currently works as a Senior Technical Consultant in an Indonesian information technology company. He has worked with several well-known institutions in Indonesia and overseas, in designing secure network architecture, deploying and managing enterprise-wide security systems, developing information security policies and procedures, doing information security audit and assessment, and giving information security awareness training. In his spare time, he manages to research, write various articles, participate in Indonesian Security Community activities, and maintain a blog site located at http://theriyanto.wordpress.com. He shares his knowledge in the information security field by writing several information security and computer programming books.

I would like to thank my family for supporting me during the whole book writing process. I would also like to thank my friends who guided me in the infosec field and were always available to discuss infosec issues: Gildas Deograt, Mada Perdhana, Pamadi Gesang, and Tom Gregory. Thanks to the technical reviewers who have provided their best knowledge in their respective fields: Arif Jatmoko, Muhammad Rasyid Sahputra, and Peter "corelanc0d3r" Van Eeckhoutte. Also thanks to the great people at Packt Publishing (Kartikey Pandey, Kavita Iyer, Tarun Singh, and Sneha Harkut), whose comments, feedback, and immediate support has turned this book development project into a successful reality. Last but not least, I would like to give my biggest thanks to my co-author, Shakeel Ali, whose technical knowledge, motivation, ideas, and suggestions made the book writing process a wonderful journey.

Peter "corelanc0d3r" Van Eeckhoutte is the founder of Corelan Team (http://www.corelan.be), bringing together a group of people who have similar interests: performing IT security/vulnerability research, sharing knowledge, writing and publishing tutorials, releasing security advisories and writing tools. His Win32 Exploit Writing Tutorial series and Immunity Debugger PyCommand "pvefindaddr" are just a few examples of his work in the security community. Peter has been working on IT security since the late 90's, focusing on exploit development since 2006.

I would like to thank my wife and daughter for their everlasting support and love, and the folks at the Corelan Team for being a truly awesome bunch of friends to work with.

Arif Jatmoko (MCom, CISSP, CISA, CCSP, CEH) is an IT Security Auditor at Bank Mandiri tbk, the biggest bank in Indonesia. Arif has spent over 15 years working as a computer security specialist. Since 1999, he joined a top Fortune 500 company as the IT security officer, runs several projects in government and military institutions, is a pentester at big4 audit firm and a few major financial institutions.

Since his early school years, Arif has enjoyed coding, debugging, and other reverse engineering stuff. These hobbies have given him the skill to perform security incident analysis for many years. Later (during his more current jobs), Arif was found to be most interested in incident analysis and computer forensics. Especially as an auditor, he frequently deals with investigative analysis in criminals and other fraudulent activities inside the company.

Muhammad Rasyid Sahputra currently works as a Security Consultant at Xynexis International. His interests range from analyzing various bugs of open-source and commercial software/products to hacking telecommunication infrastructure