Book Image

Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux - Third Edition

By : Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez, Juned Ahmed Ansari
Book Image

Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux - Third Edition

By: Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez, Juned Ahmed Ansari

Overview of this book

Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux - Third Edition shows you how to set up a lab, helps you understand the nature and mechanics of attacking websites, and explains classical attacks in great depth. This edition is heavily updated for the latest Kali Linux changes and the most recent attacks. Kali Linux shines when it comes to client-side attacks and fuzzing in particular. From the start of the book, you'll be given a thorough grounding in the concepts of hacking and penetration testing, and you'll see the tools used in Kali Linux that relate to web application hacking. You'll gain a deep understanding of classicalSQL, command-injection flaws, and the many ways to exploit these flaws. Web penetration testing also needs a general overview of client-side attacks, which is rounded out by a long discussion of scripting and input validation flaws. There is also an important chapter on cryptographic implementation flaws, where we discuss the most recent problems with cryptographic layers in the networking stack. The importance of these attacks cannot be overstated, and defending against them is relevant to most internet users and, of course, penetration testers. At the end of the book, you'll use an automated technique called fuzzing to identify flaws in a web application. Finally, you'll gain an understanding of web application vulnerabilities and the ways they can be exploited using the tools in Kali Linux.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Kali Linux


In this book, we will use the tools provided by Kali Linux to accomplish our testing. Kali Linux is a Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution. Kali Linux is used by security professionals to perform offensive security tasks, and it is maintained by a company known as Offensive Security. The predecessor of Kali Linux is BackTrack, which was one of the primary tools used by penetration testers for more than six years until 2013, when it was replaced by Kali Linux. In August 2015, the second version of Kali Linux was released with the code name Kali Sana, and in January 2016, it switched to a rolling release.

This means that the software is continuously updated without the need to change the operating system version. Kali Linux comes with a large set of popular hacking tools, which are ready to use with all of the prerequisites installed. We will take a deep dive into the tools and use them to test web applications that are vulnerable to major flaws which are found in real-world web applications.