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)

Security by Obscurity – The Siren Song

The appeal—and trap—of security by obscurity is the ease with which strategies can be implemented, especially when compared to more rigorous credential management systems. Obscuring a piece of sensitive information just means scrambling it, rearranging and reordering it, until it looks like gibberish. Looks like is the operative phrase, since patterns can be detected outside the scope of human intuition or estimation.

The assumptions behind this sort of strategy invariably contain an element of human fallibility—someone couldn't find X, or trip across Y, because the odds are so stupendously against them, considering the scope of the application, the minimal nature of the vulnerability, and the implicitly assumed man-hours of brute-forcing a solution to the problem. But, of course, computers aren't constrained...