Chapter 15
Exploiting Information Disclosure
Chapter 4 described various techniques you can use to map a target application and gain an initial understanding of how it works. That methodology involved interacting with the application in largely benign ways to catalog its content and functionality, determine the technologies in use, and identify the key attack surface.
This chapter describes ways in which you can extract further information from an application during an actual attack. This mainly involves interacting with the application in unexpected and malicious ways and exploiting anomalies in the application's behavior to extract information that is of value to you. If successful, such an attack may enable you to retrieve sensitive data such as user credentials, gain a deeper understanding of an error condition to fine-tune your attack, discover more details about the technologies in use, and map the application's internal structure and functionality.