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

Target mapping


The traditional nmap of the entire port range, with service discovery, is always a good place to start when gathering information on a target. Nmap is the network scanning tool of choice and has been for many years. It is still very powerful and very relevant. It is available on most platforms, including Kali, BlackArch, and even Windows.

Metasploit Framework (MSF) is a penetration testing framework commonly used by security professionals. Besides being a fantastic collection of easy-to-deliver exploits, it can also help to organize engagements. For target mapping specifically, you can leverage the workspace feature and neatly store your Nmap scan results in a database.

If the Kali Linux instance is fresh or Metasploit was recently installed, the database may need a kick to get it going.

In the Kali console prompt, start the PostgreSQL service using the service command. If successful, there should be no message returned:

root@kali:~# service postgresql start
root@kali:~#

Metasploit...