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

Web application vulnerability scanners in Kali Linux


Kali Linux includes multiple tools for automated vulnerability scanning of web applications. We have examined some of these already, particularly the ones focused on specific vulnerabilities such as sqlmap for SQL injection or XSSer for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS).

Next, we will cover the basic usage of some of the more general web vulnerability scanners listed here:

  • Nikto
  • Skipfish
  • Wapiti
  • OWASP-ZAP

Nikto

A long-time classic, Nikto is perhaps the most widely used and well-known web vulnerability scanner in the world. Even though its scanning operation is not very deep and its findings are somewhat generic (they are, by and large, related to outdated software versions, the use of vulnerable components, or misconfigurations detected by analyzing the response headers), Nikto is still a very useful tool because of its extensive set of tests and due to its low likelihood of breaking things.

Nikto is a command-line tool. In the following screenshot, nikto...