Book Image

Hands-On Bug Hunting for Penetration Testers

By : Joe Marshall, Himanshu Sharma
Book Image

Hands-On Bug Hunting for Penetration Testers

By: Joe Marshall, Himanshu Sharma

Overview of this book

Bug bounties have quickly become a critical part of the security economy. This book shows you how technical professionals with an interest in security can begin productively—and profitably—participating in bug bounty programs. You will learn about SQli, NoSQLi, XSS, XXE, and other forms of code injection. You’ll see how to create CSRF PoC HTML snippets, how to discover hidden content (and what to do with it once it’s found), and how to create the tools for automated pentesting work?ows. Then, you’ll format all of this information within the context of a bug report that will have the greatest chance of earning you cash. With detailed walkthroughs that cover discovering, testing, and reporting vulnerabilities, this book is ideal for aspiring security professionals. You should come away from this work with the skills you need to not only find the bugs you're looking for, but also the best bug bounty programs to participate in, and how to grow your skills moving forward in freelance security research.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Access Control and Security Through Obscurity

Security through (or by) obscurity is a strategy in web application development that assumes a hacker can't hack what he can't see; even if a vulnerability exists, as long as it's appropriately hidden or obfuscated, it'll never be discovered and used for malicious purposes.

While this can feel true (how could someone find this thing I've cleverly hidden—I've cleverly hidden it), it ignores a basic understanding of computers and programming. Computers are great at finding needles in haystacks. And it's not just one person programming one script on one machine who's interested in probing your site for vulnerabilities; any site exposed to the internet faces a 24/7/365 crowd-sourced attempt to compromise its network. When you assume that no one will find your hidden exploit, you're actually...