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

Fuzzing terminology

To have a better understanding of fuzzing and fuzzing techniques, let's have a look at different fuzzing terminology that will help us to grasp the fuzzing concepts and techniques that are used in this chapter:

  • Fuzzer: A fuzzer is a program/tool that injects malformed/semi-malformed data into the server/web application and observes the behavior of the application to detect bugs. The malformed/semi-malformed data used by the fuzzer is generated using a generator.
  • Generator: A generator uses a combination of fuzzing vectors and some random data. The generated data is then fed to the fuzzer, which injects this malformed data into the application.
  • Fuzz vectors: A fuzz vector is a known-to-be-dangerous value that is used by the fuzzer. By observing the behavior of the application, the fuzzer can inject different fuzz vectors.
  • Input seeds: These are valid input...