Book Image

Becoming the Hacker

By : Adrian Pruteanu
Book Image

Becoming the Hacker

By: Adrian Pruteanu

Overview of this book

Becoming the Hacker will teach you how to approach web penetration testing with an attacker's mindset. While testing web applications for performance is common, the ever-changing threat landscape makes security testing much more difficult for the defender. There are many web application tools that claim to provide a complete survey and defense against potential threats, but they must be analyzed in line with the security needs of each web application or service. We must understand how an attacker approaches a web application and the implications of breaching its defenses. Through the first part of the book, Adrian Pruteanu walks you through commonly encountered vulnerabilities and how to take advantage of them to achieve your goal. The latter part of the book shifts gears and puts the newly learned techniques into practice, going over scenarios where the target may be a popular content management system or a containerized application and its network. Becoming the Hacker is a clear guide to web application security from an attacker's point of view, from which both sides can benefit.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Becoming the Hacker
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 10. Practical Server-Side Attacks

In the previous chapter, we went through a series of practical attacks against users, leveraging application vulnerabilities to achieve our goal. The focus of this chapter will be server-side attacks, primarily by exploiting XML vulnerabilities. Despite the fact that JSON has gained a large market share of data exchange in web applications, XML is still fairly prevalent. It's not as clean as JSON and can be a bit harder to read, but it is mature. There are a ton of XML-parsing libraries for any language a developer may choose to complete a project with. Java is still popular in the enterprise world and the Android phenomenon has only spawned more Java enthusiasts. Microsoft is still very fond of XML and you'll find it all over its operating system, in the application manifests, and in IIS website configuration files.

The goal of this chapter is to get you comfortable with XML attacks and, by the end, you will be familiar with:

  • DoS conditions

  • Server...