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

Summary


With this, we come to the end of the chapter. We worked through the reconnaissance phase and finished by scanning the web server. In the following diagram, you can view the tasks involved in the reconnaissance phase of a penetration test and some useful tools in Kali Linux that can be used for each task:

Reconnaissance is the first stage of a penetration test. When testing a target that is accessible from the internet, search engines and social networking websites can reveal useful information. Search engines store a wealth of information that is helpful when performing a black box penetration. We used these free resources to identify information that a malicious user might use against the target. Kali Linux has several tools that help you achieve your objectives, and we used a few of them in this chapter.

Finally, we moved on to the scanning phase, which required the hacker to interact actively with the web application in order to identify vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.

In...