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 12. Attacking CMS

In this chapter, we will discuss attacking CMSs and WordPress in particular. It's hard to talk about web applications and not mention WordPress. WordPress is so common on the internet that you will likely come across many instances of it in your career. After all, almost a third of all websites are running on the platform and it is by far the most popular CMS.

There are alternatives to WordPress, including Drupal, Joomla, and other more modern applications, such as Ghost. All of these frameworks aim to make content publishing on the web easy and hassle free. You don't need to know JavaScript, HTML, PHP, or any other technology to get going. CMSs are generally extensible through plugins and highly customizable through themes. What sets WordPress apart is the sheer volume of installs across the internet. You are far more likely to come across a WordPress blog than a Ghost blog, for example.

Attackers love WordPress because the very thing that sets it apart from the...