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 11. Attacking APIs

So far, we've looked at attacking a traditional application — one with a user interface and a login panel, and maybe a dashboard of some sort. Modern applications tend to implement a decoupled infrastructure and, unlike traditional applications, they are split into smaller applications or microservices, all working together to provide functionality for the user. Application programming interfaces (APIs) are not a new concept. The term API is used for anything from the Windows library of code, which allows our user-land code to interact with the operating system kernel, to the service exposed on the web that powers our note-taking apps. Obviously, we will not be focusing on the Windows API (WinAPI), but we will look at the web applications that power seemingly everything on the internet. When I speak of APIs in this chapter, I am referring to web services specifically.

Microservices are a relatively new concept adopted by application developers, moving away from...