Most applications that are developed these days integrate different web technologies. This increases the complexity and risk of exposing sensitive data. Web applications have always been a long-standing target for malicious adversaries to steal, manipulate, sabotage, and extort corporate businesses. This proliferation of web applications has brought forth enormous challenges for penetration testers. The key is to secure both the web applications (frontend) and the databases (backend), as well as the network security countermeasures. This is necessary because web applications act as a data-processing system, and the database is responsible for storing sensitive data (for example, credit cards, customer details, authentication data, and so on).

The tools presented in this section mainly focus on the front-end security of web infrastructure. They can be used to identify, analyze, and exploit a wide range of application security vulnerabilities. These include cross-site...