Book Image

Practical Web Penetration Testing

By : Gus Khawaja
Book Image

Practical Web Penetration Testing

By: Gus Khawaja

Overview of this book

Companies all over the world want to hire professionals dedicated to application security. Practical Web Penetration Testing focuses on this very trend, teaching you how to conduct application security testing using real-life scenarios. To start with, you’ll set up an environment to perform web application penetration testing. You will then explore different penetration testing concepts such as threat modeling, intrusion test, infrastructure security threat, and more, in combination with advanced concepts such as Python scripting for automation. Once you are done learning the basics, you will discover end-to-end implementation of tools such as Metasploit, Burp Suite, and Kali Linux. Many companies deliver projects into production by using either Agile or Waterfall methodology. This book shows you how to assist any company with their SDLC approach and helps you on your journey to becoming an application security specialist. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on knowledge of using different tools for penetration testing.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
13
Metasploit Cheat Sheet

Installing Mutillidae on Linux

You probably hate Windows, so Linux is probably your favorite operating system, and you would prefer to install Mutillidae on Linux. In this section, I will use Ubuntu version 17.10 to install Mutillidae. If you have skipped the Windows installation section, let me tell you that you will need to install XAMPP on Linux before installing Mutillidae. Now, if you don't know what XAMPP is, don't worry; it refers to Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl. The X at the beginning indicates that this application is cross-platform (it's also called LAMPP on Linux; the L stands for Linux). So, as you may have guessed, through installing XAMPP, you will have Apache (web server), MySQL (database), and PHP (programming language).

Downloading and installing XAMPP

To download XAMPP, browse to https://www.apachefriends.org/download.html, then choose the latest version from the list, which is 7.1.1, in my case (see the following screenshot). Then, click on the Download button to save it locally to your machine:

Open the Terminal window and make sure that your current directory is where the file is located (in my case, it's the Downloads folder). Next, you need to give the installer permission to execute, by using the following command:

Now that the installer has permission to execute, let's run it:

After executing the installer, you will be prompted with a couple of questions; hit the letter Y to say yes and continue further:

Enter a final Y before starting the installation of XAMPP:

Voila! XAMPP has been successfully installed on the Ubuntu machine:

Congratulations! You just finished installing XAMPP. Take note that LAMPP is installed on /opt/lampp, which is where you're going to manage your web projects.

Mutillidae installation

I'm assuming that you have already downloaded Mutillidae, as described previously. First, you will need to extract the compressed archive file. Right-click and select Extract Here from the menu.

Next, copy the mutillidae folder into the /opt/lampp/htdocs folder:

After copying the mutillidae folder, change your directory to /opt/lampp, and start the XAMPP servers:

Open the browser, type http://[Ubuntu IP Address]/mutillidae, and replace the IP address with your own local IP address on the Ubuntu host where you installed XAMPP. Or, simply use the localhost, if you're using the browser on your Ubuntu server. To get your local IP address on Linux, type the command ifconfig in your Terminal window:

Don't panic! When the page loads for the first time, it will ask you to set up the server. In order to do so, click on the setup/reset the DB link, and Mutillidae will be installed on the XAMPP server:

Perfect! Mutillidae is installed, with no errors, according to the pop-up message. All you need to do at this point is click on the OK button, and you will be redirected to the Mutillidae home page. Amazing, right?