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 2. Efficient Discovery

Content discovery and information gathering are typically the first steps when attacking an application. The goal is to figure out as much as possible about the application in the quickest manner possible. Time is a luxury we don't have and we must make the most of our limited resources.

Efficiency can also help us to remain a bit quieter when attacking applications. Smart wordlists will reduce the number of requests we make to the server and return results faster. This isn't a silver bullet, but it's a good place to start.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • The different types of penetration testing engagements

  • Target mapping with various network and web scanners

  • Efficient brute-forcing techniques

  • Polyglot payloads