Book Image

Hands-On Application Penetration Testing with Burp Suite

By : Carlos A. Lozano, Dhruv Shah, Riyaz Ahemed Walikar
Book Image

Hands-On Application Penetration Testing with Burp Suite

By: Carlos A. Lozano, Dhruv Shah, Riyaz Ahemed Walikar

Overview of this book

Burp suite is a set of graphic tools focused towards penetration testing of web applications. Burp suite is widely used for web penetration testing by many security professionals for performing different web-level security tasks. The book starts by setting up the environment to begin an application penetration test. You will be able to configure the client and apply target whitelisting. You will also learn to setup and configure Android and IOS devices to work with Burp Suite. The book will explain how various features of Burp Suite can be used to detect various vulnerabilities as part of an application penetration test. Once detection is completed and the vulnerability is confirmed, you will be able to exploit a detected vulnerability using Burp Suite. The book will also covers advanced concepts like writing extensions and macros for Burp suite. Finally, you will discover various steps that are taken to identify the target, discover weaknesses in the authentication mechanism, and finally break the authentication implementation to gain access to the administrative console of the application. By the end of this book, you will be able to effectively perform end-to-end penetration testing with Burp Suite.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Contributors
About Packt
Preface
12
Exploiting and Exfiltrating Data from a Large Shipping Corporation
Index

Getting to know Burp Suite


Burp can be downloaded for all the major operating systems from the PortSwigger website at https://portswigger.net/burp. For Windows systems, both x64-bit and x32-bit installers are available. A standalone Java JAR file is also available in case you want to run Burp as a portable application.

When you start Burp Suite, you will be prompted to provide settings to set up your Burp project before you begin using the tool.

The three options available are as follows:

  • Temporary project: Select this if you want to use Burp for a quick inspection or a task that you do not need to save. You can get started immediately when you select this option and hit Next.
  • New project on disk: For a well-executed penetration test, it is very important to be able to record and retrieve logs of requests and responses that were part of the test. This option allows you to create a file on the disk that will store all the configuration data, requests, and responses, and proxy information that you set in Burp when you begin testing. A descriptive name can be provided to enable this file to be loaded in the future. A good rule of thumb is to create a name that provides information about the project itself. ClientName-TypeOfTest-DDMMYYYY is a good name to start with.
  • Open existing project: This option allows you to load any existing project files that have been created in the past using the New project on disk option. You can choose to pause the spider and scanner modules so that the project is loaded in a non-active state of attack.

Clicking on Next will take you to a page where you can choose any save configuration from before or continue using Burp defaults. You also get the option of disabling extensions when Burp starts.

Click Start Burp to continue.