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

An overview of Cross-Site Scripting


The name, Cross-Site Scripting, may not intuitively relate to its current definition. This is because the term originally referred to a related, but different attack. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was possible to read data from web pages loaded in adjacent windows or frames using JavaScript code. Thus, a malicious website could cross the boundary between the two and interact with contents loaded on an entirely different web page not related to its domain. This was later fixed by browser developers, but the attack name was inherited by the technique that makes web pages load and execute malicious scripts in the browser rather than reading contents from adjacent frames.

In simple terms, an XSS attack allows the attacker to execute malicious script code in another user's browser. It could be JavaScript, VBScript, or any other script code, although JavaScript is by far the one used most commonly. The malicious script is delivered to the client via a...