Book Image

Python: Penetration Testing for Developers

By : Christopher Duffy, Mohit , Cameron Buchanan, Andrew Mabbitt, Terry Ip, Dave Mound, Benjamin May
Book Image

Python: Penetration Testing for Developers

By: Christopher Duffy, Mohit , Cameron Buchanan, Andrew Mabbitt, Terry Ip, Dave Mound, Benjamin May

Overview of this book

Cybercriminals are always one step ahead, when it comes to tools and techniques. This means you need to use the same tools and adopt the same mindset to properly secure your software. This course shows you how to do just that, demonstrating how effective Python can be for powerful pentesting that keeps your software safe. Comprising of three key modules, follow each one to push your Python and security skills to the next level. In the first module, we’ll show you how to get to grips with the fundamentals. This means you’ll quickly find out how to tackle some of the common challenges facing pentesters using custom Python tools designed specifically for your needs. You’ll also learn what tools to use and when, giving you complete confidence when deploying your pentester tools to combat any potential threat. In the next module you’ll begin hacking into the application layer. Covering everything from parameter tampering, DDoS, XXS and SQL injection, it will build on the knowledge and skills you learned in the first module to make you an even more fluent security expert. Finally in the third module, you’ll find more than 60 Python pentesting recipes. We think this will soon become your trusted resource for any pentesting situation. This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products: ? Learning Penetration Testing with Python by Christopher Duffy ? Python Penetration Testing Essentials by Mohit ? Python Web Penetration Testing Cookbook by Cameron Buchanan,Terry Ip, Andrew Mabbitt, Benjamin May and Dave Mound
Table of Contents (32 chapters)
Python: Penetration Testing for Developers
Python: Penetration Testing for Developers
Credits
Preface
Bibliography
Index

Header-based Cross-site scripting


Until now, we have focused on sending payloads through URLs and parameters, the two obvious methods of performing attacks. However, there are numerous rich and fertile sources of vulnerabilities that often lay untouched. One of these will be covered in depth in Chapter 6, Image Analysis and Manipulation, for which we can give an intro now. Logs are often kept of specific headers of users that are accessing web pages. It can be a worthwhile activity performing checks against these logs by performing XSS attacks in headers.

We will be creating a script that submits XSS attack strings to all available headers and cycles through several possible XSS attacks. We will provide a short list of payloads, grab all the headers, and submit them sequentially.

Getting ready

Identify the URL that you wish to test. See the end of this example for a PHP web page that the script can be used against in order to test the validity of the scripts.

How to do it…

Once you've identified...