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

Scanning for XSS flaws


With hundreds of possible payload variants, and being one of the most common vulnerabilities in web applications, XSS can sometimes be difficult to find or, if found, difficult to generate a convincing proof of concept exploit that motivates the client's team to dedicate the time and effort to fix it. Additionally, big applications with hundreds or thousands of input parameters are nearly impossible to cover completely in time-boxed tests.

For these reasons, you may need to make use of automation to be able to generate results faster, even when some degree of precision may be sacrificed and with an increased risk of triggering some service disruption in the application. There are many web vulnerability scanners, both free and paid, with a wide range of degrees of accuracy, stability, and safety. We will now review a couple of specialized scanners for XSS vulnerabilities that have proven to be efficient and reliable.

XSSer

Cross Site "Scripter" (XSSer) is an automatic...