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

Obtaining session cookies through XSS


We have already talked about Cross Site Scripting (XSS), it is one of the most common web attacks nowadays. XSS can be used to trick the users to provide credentials by simulating login pages, to gather information by executing client-side commands, or to hijack sessions by obtaining session cookies and impersonating their legitimate owners in the attacker's browsers.

In this recipe, we will take advantage of a persistent XSS vulnerability to obtain the session cookie of a user and then use that cookie to hijack the session by implanting it in another browser, and then executing actions impersonating the user.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will set up a web server that will act as our cookie gatherer; so, before we attack, we need to start the Apache server in our Kali machine and run the following in a terminal as root:

service apache2 start

In the system used for this book, Apache's document root is located at /var/www/html, create a file called savecookie...