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

Chapter 4

  1. The HTTP header detection module grabs the HTTP headers in the server response. If the administrator has already blocked/removed the HTTP header, this module will not provide you with any output. The module works fine.

  2. By default, the Metasploit web interface comes with NMAP version 4.x (pre-installed) in the package, which is used to perform host discovery and port scans. For better results, you can install and use the latest version of NMAP.

  3. Yes, you can. The web interface only provides a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the Metasploit framework, so you can add your own custom modules as well.

  4. You can place a reverse proxy in front of the page. You'll have to first authenticate yourself with an HTTP basic authentication mechanism and then you can use the login page to authenticate with the Metasploit web interface. For further information, check the documentation...