Book Image

Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux

Book Image

Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux

Overview of this book

Kali Linux is built for professional penetration testing and security auditing. It is the next-generation of BackTrack, the most popular open-source penetration toolkit in the world. Readers will learn how to think like real attackers, exploit systems, and expose vulnerabilities. Even though web applications are developed in a very secure environment and have an intrusion detection system and firewall in place to detect and prevent any malicious activity, open ports are a pre-requisite for conducting online business. These ports serve as an open door for attackers to attack these applications. As a result, penetration testing becomes essential to test the integrity of web-applications. Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux is a hands-on guide that will give you step-by-step methods on finding vulnerabilities and exploiting web applications. "Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux" looks at the aspects of web penetration testing from the mind of an attacker. It provides real-world, practical step-by-step instructions on how to perform web penetration testing exercises. You will learn how to use network reconnaissance to pick your targets and gather information. Then, you will use server-side attacks to expose vulnerabilities in web servers and their applications. Client attacks will exploit the way end users use web applications and their workstations. You will also learn how to use open source tools to write reports and get tips on how to sell penetration tests and look out for common pitfalls. On the completion of this book, you will have the skills needed to use Kali Linux for web penetration tests and expose vulnerabilities on web applications and clients that access them.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Obtaining and cracking user passwords


Password cracking by definition is recovering passwords from data that has been stored or transmitted by a computer system. Passwords are used to secure various system types, which we have touched upon in Chapter 3, Server-side Attacks, while attacking web servers.

Host systems are usually Windows or Linux-based and have specific characteristics regarding how they store and protect user passwords. This section will focus on cracking host system password files. We included this in the Web Application Penetration Testing book, because host systems are a common authorized client to web applications. Compromising a client means opening a door to access a targeted web application.

The easiest method to obtain user passwords is through social engineering. As previously described, a hacker could obtain passwords or clues to how passwords are created by posing as an authorized subject. For example, identifying that all passwords must be between 6-10 characters...