Book Image

The Web Application Hacker's Handbook

By : Dafydd Stuttard, Marcus Pinto
Book Image

The Web Application Hacker's Handbook

By: Dafydd Stuttard, Marcus Pinto

Overview of this book

Web applications are the front door to most organizations, exposing them to attacks that may disclose personal information, execute fraudulent transactions, or compromise ordinary users. This practical book has been completely updated and revised to discuss the latest step-by-step techniques for attacking and defending the range of ever-evolving web applications. Youíll explore the various new technologies employed in web applications that have appeared since the first edition and review the new attack techniques that have been developed, particularly in relation to the client side. The book starts with the current state of web application security and the trends that indicate how it is likely to evolve soon. Youíll examine the core security problem affecting web applications and the defence mechanisms that applications implement to address this problem, and youíll also explore the key technologies used in todayís web application. Next, youíll carry out tasks for breaking into web applications and for executing a comprehensive attack. As you progress, youíll learn to find vulnerabilities in an application's source code and review the tools that can help when you hack web applications. Youíll also study a detailed methodology for performing a comprehensive and deep attack against a specific target. By the end of this book, youíll be able to discover security flaws in web applications and how to deal with them.
Table of Contents (32 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Cover
2
Title
3
Copyright
4
About the Authors
5
About the Technical Editor
6
MDSec: The Authors’ Company
7
Credits
8
Acknowledgments
31
Index
32
End User License Agreement

Overview of This Book

The focus of this book is highly practical. Although we include sufficient background and theory for you to understand the vulnerabilities that web applications contain, our primary concern is the tasks and techniques that you need to master to break into them. Throughout the book, we spell out the specific steps you need to follow to detect each type of vulnerability, and how to exploit it to perform unauthorized actions. We also include a wealth of real-world examples, derived from the authors' many years of experience, illustrating how different kinds of security flaws manifest themselves in today's web applications.

Security awareness is usually a double-edged sword. Just as application developers can benefit from understanding the methods attackers use, hackers can gain from knowing how applications can effectively defend themselves. In addition to describing security vulnerabilities and attack techniques, we describe in detail the countermeasures...