Book Image

Hands-On Web Penetration Testing with Metasploit

By : Harpreet Singh, Himanshu Sharma
Book Image

Hands-On Web Penetration Testing with Metasploit

By: Harpreet Singh, Himanshu Sharma

Overview of this book

Metasploit has been a crucial security tool for many years. However, there are only a few modules that Metasploit has made available to the public for pentesting web applications. In this book, you'll explore another aspect of the framework – web applications – which is not commonly used. You'll also discover how Metasploit, when used with its inbuilt GUI, simplifies web application penetration testing. The book starts by focusing on the Metasploit setup, along with covering the life cycle of the penetration testing process. Then, you will explore Metasploit terminology and the web GUI, which is available in the Metasploit Community Edition. Next, the book will take you through pentesting popular content management systems such as Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla, which will also include studying the latest CVEs and understanding the root cause of vulnerability in detail. Later, you'll gain insights into the vulnerability assessment and exploitation of technological platforms such as JBoss, Jenkins, and Tomcat. Finally, you'll learn how to fuzz web applications to find logical security vulnerabilities using third-party tools. By the end of this book, you'll have a solid understanding of how to exploit and validate vulnerabilities by working with various tools and techniques.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Introduction
5
The Pentesting Life Cycle with Metasploit
10
Pentesting Content Management Systems (CMSes)
14
Performing Pentesting on Technological Platforms
18
Logical Bug Hunting

An introduction to Joomla

Joomla is a free, open source CMS created by Open Source Matters, Inc. for the publication of web content. It is based on a Model-View-Controller (MVC) web application framework, which can be used independently of the CMS. Joomla was founded on August 17, 2005, as a result of a Mambo fork.

Joomla has thousands of extensions and templates and a lot of them are available free of charge. Some of Joomla's features include the following:

  • It is multilingual.
  • It provides out-of-the-box Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and is Search Engine Friendly (SEF).
  • It is free to use under a General Public License (GPL).
  • It has access control lists that allow you to manage the users of a website, as well as different groups.
  • It has menu management, so as many menus and menu items as required can be created.

Now that we have covered a short introduction to Joomla...