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

Introduction


Every penetration test, be it for a network or a web application, has a workflow; it has a series of stages that should be completed in order to increase our chances of finding and exploiting every possible vulnerability affecting our targets, such as:

  • Reconnaissance

  • Enumeration

  • Exploitation

  • Maintaining access

  • Cleaning tracks

In a network penetration testing scenario, reconnaissance is the phase where testers must identify all the assets in the network, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems. They also gather the maximum information about the company, the network, and the employees. In our case, for a web application penetration test, this stage will be all about getting to know the application, the database, the users, the server, and the relation between the application and us.

Reconnaissance is an essential stage in every penetration test; the more information we have about our target, the more options we will have when it comes to finding vulnerabilities and exploiting them...