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

Container breakout


We have access to the container's shell through the Meterpreter session and through that session, we can talk to other application containers hosted on the same machine. In the earlier Nmap scan of the Docker network, the 8022 service also stood out from the rest. As attackers, services with ports in the 8000 range are always interesting because underprotected development web servers can be found there. This particular port could be an exploitable web application and may give us more access than we currently have.

The Nmap scan report for the content_ssh_1 container also had the SSH port open, but this service is typically harder to exploit, short of brute-forcing for weak credentials:

Nmap scan report for content_ssh_1.content_default (172.18.0.2)
Host is up (0.00056s latency).
Not shown: 65534 closed ports
PORT     STATE SERVICE
22/tcp   open  ssh
8022/tcp open  unknown

If we go back and drop into a shell on the compromised container, we can execute a quick curl command...