Book Image

Kali Linux Web Penetration Testing Cookbook

By : Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez
Book Image

Kali Linux Web Penetration Testing Cookbook

By: Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez

Overview of this book

Web applications are a huge point of attack for malicious hackers and a critical area for security professionals and penetration testers to lock down and secure. Kali Linux is a Linux-based penetration testing platform and operating system that provides a huge array of testing tools, many of which can be used specifically to execute web penetration testing. This book will teach you, in the form step-by-step recipes, how to detect a wide array of vulnerabilities, exploit them to analyze their consequences, and ultimately buffer attackable surfaces so applications are more secure, for you and your users. Starting from the setup of a testing laboratory, this book will give you the skills you need to cover every stage of a penetration test: from gathering information about the system and the application to identifying vulnerabilities through manual testing and the use of vulnerability scanners to both basic and advanced exploitation techniques that may lead to a full system compromise. Finally, we will put this into the context of OWASP and the top 10 web application vulnerabilities you are most likely to encounter, equipping you with the ability to combat them effectively. By the end of the book, you will have the required skills to identify, exploit, and prevent web application vulnerabilities.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Kali Linux Web Penetration Testing Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Installing and running OWASP Mantra


People in OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project, https://www.owasp.org/) have put together a Mozilla Firefox mod with plenty of add-ons aimed at helping penetration testers and developers to test web applications for bugs or security flaws. In this recipe, we will install OWASP-Mantra (http://www.getmantra.com/) in our Kali Linux, run it for the first time, and see some of its features.

Most of the web application penetration testing is done through a web browser; that's the reason why we need to have one with the correct set of tools to perform such a task. The OWASP Mantra includes a collection of add-ons to perform tasks, such as:

  • Sniffing and intercepting HTTP requests

  • Debugging client-side code

  • Viewing and modifying cookies

  • Gathering information about sites and applications

Getting ready

Fortunately for us, OWASP Mantra is included in the default Kali Linux repositories. So, to make sure that we get the latest version of the browser, we need to update the packages list:

apt-get update

How to do it...

  1. Open a terminal and run:

    apt-get install owasp-mantra-ff
    
  2. After the installation is finished, navigate to menu: Applications | 03 - Web Application Analysis | Web Vulnerability Scanners | owasp-mantra-ff to start Mantra for the first time. Or use a terminal with the following command:

    owasp-mantra-ff
    
  3. With the new browser open, click on the OWASP logo and then Tools. Here we can access all the tools that OWASP Mantra includes.
  4. We will use some of these tools in later chapters.

See also

You may also be interested in Mantra on Chromium (MoC), which is an alternative release of Mantra based on the Chromium web browser. Currently, it is only available for windows: http://www.getmantra.com/mantra-on-chromium.html