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


A Man in the Middle (MITM) attack is the type of attack in which the attacker sets himself in the middle of the communication line between two parties, usually a client and a server. This is done by breaking the original channel and then intercepting messages from one party and relaying them (sometimes with alterations) to the other.

Let's look at the following example:

Alice is connected to a web server and Bob wants to know what information Alice is sending so Bob sets up a MITM attack by telling the server he is Alice and telling Alice he is the server. Now, all Alice's requests will go to Bob and Bob will resend them (altered or not) to the web server, doing the same with the server's responses. In this way, Bob will be able to intercept, read and modify all traffic between Alice and the server.

Although MITM attacks are not specifically web attacks, it is important for any penetration tester to know about them, how to perform them and how to prevent them as they can be used...