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

Introduction to Metasploit Framework

Metasploit is the first tool that comes to mind whenever we think about penetration testing or exploitation. Metasploit Framework is a subproject of the Metasploit project. The Metasploit project helps us by providing information about vulnerabilities, as well as helping us with penetration testing.

Metasploit first appeared in 2003. It was developed by H.D Moore using Perl, but was later ported to Ruby in 2007. By October 2009, Rapid7 had acquired the Metasploit project. Rapid 7 then added commercial versions of Metasploit Express and Metasploit Pro. This is when the evolution of Metasploit Framework began.

Metasploit Framework is an open source framework that allows us to write, test, and execute exploit code. It can also be considered a collection of tools for penetration testing and exploitation.

In this chapter, we will cover the basics...