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

Postman


When testing a typical web application, we first configure the system proxy to point to Burp Suite. Now, all of our requests can be inspected as we walk through the app. It's easy to launch attacks because these requests are built for us by the user interface that Burp can see over the wire. During normal operation, users enter data in a search field, for example, and the application constructs the GET or POST request with all the appropriate parameters, before sending it over the wire. All of these valid requests are now available for replay, modification, and scanning through the attack proxy. The discovery process is much simpler when there is a user interface to drive traffic generation.

If there is no user interface component and all we have is an API endpoint, and some documentation to work with, it is very tedious to build a series of curl requests and manually parse the responses. If authentication is required for interaction, requesting tokens would be a nightmare for complex...