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

Important tools in Kali Linux


Once you have Kali Linux up and running, you can start playing with the tools. Since this book is about web application hacking, all of the major tools on which we will be spending most of our time can be accessed from Applications | Web Application Analysis. The following screenshot shows the tools present in Web Application Analysis:

In Kali Linux, the tools in Web Applications Analysis are further divided into four categories, as listed here:

  • CMS & Framework Identification
  • Web Application Proxies
  • Web Crawlers and Directory Bruteforce
  • Web Vulnerability Scanners

Content Management Systems (CMS) are very popular on the internet and hundreds of websites have been deployed using one of them—WordPress. Plugins and themes are an integral part of WordPress websites. However, there have been a huge number of security issues associated with these add-ons. WordPress websites are usually administered by ordinary users who are unconcerned about security, and they rarely...