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

Scanning with w3af


W3af stands for Web Application Audit and Attack Framework. It is an open source, Python-based Web vulnerability scanner. It has a GUI and a command-line interface, both with the same functionality. In this recipe, we will perform a vulnerability scan using W3af's GUI to configure the scanning and reporting options.

How to do it...

  1. To start W3af, we can select it from the Applications menu by navigating to Applications | 03 Web Application Analysis | w3af. or from the terminal:

    w3af_gui
    
  2. In the Profiles section, we select full_audit.

  3. In the plugins section, go to crawl and select web_spider (the one that is checked) inside it.

  4. We don't want the scanner to test all the servers, just the application we tell it to. In the plugin description, check the only_forward option and click on Save.

  5. Now, we will tell W3af to generate an HTML report when the scan is finished. Go to output plugins and check html_file.

  6. To select the file name and where to save the report, modify the output_file...