Book Image

Hands-On Application Penetration Testing with Burp Suite

By : Carlos A. Lozano, Dhruv Shah, Riyaz Ahemed Walikar
Book Image

Hands-On Application Penetration Testing with Burp Suite

By: Carlos A. Lozano, Dhruv Shah, Riyaz Ahemed Walikar

Overview of this book

Burp suite is a set of graphic tools focused towards penetration testing of web applications. Burp suite is widely used for web penetration testing by many security professionals for performing different web-level security tasks. The book starts by setting up the environment to begin an application penetration test. You will be able to configure the client and apply target whitelisting. You will also learn to setup and configure Android and IOS devices to work with Burp Suite. The book will explain how various features of Burp Suite can be used to detect various vulnerabilities as part of an application penetration test. Once detection is completed and the vulnerability is confirmed, you will be able to exploit a detected vulnerability using Burp Suite. The book will also covers advanced concepts like writing extensions and macros for Burp suite. Finally, you will discover various steps that are taken to identify the target, discover weaknesses in the authentication mechanism, and finally break the authentication implementation to gain access to the administrative console of the application. By the end of this book, you will be able to effectively perform end-to-end penetration testing with Burp Suite.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Contributors
About Packt
Preface
12
Exploiting and Exfiltrating Data from a Large Shipping Corporation
Index

Initiating a penetration test


An application penetration test is always said to be incomplete if it does not do the following:

  • Following the standard methodology of performing recon
  • Enumerating functionality
  • Testing individual parameters
  • Creating test cases
  • Performing non-invasive exploitation
  • Providing a report that talks about the issue
  • Implementing steps to reproduce, proof of concept code, and possible mitigation

During my career, on numerous occasions, I have come across security consulting companies or independent professionals that are known to run an automated scanner that detects only a handful of vulnerabilities and almost always does not discover logical issues. These vulnerabilities are then exploited with a half-baked exploit that does very little in terms of explaining the business impact and criticality of the findings to the end client.

Scanning for vulnerabilities using an automated scanner is the most common approach taken when it comes to detecting vulnerabilities quickly. This...