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

Efficient brute-forcing


A brute-force attack typically involves a barrage of requests, or guesses, to gain access or reveal information that may be otherwise hidden. We may brute-force a login form on an administrative panel in order to look for commonly used passwords or usernames. We may also brute-force a web application's root directory looking for common misconfiguration and misplaced sensitive files.

Many successful engagements were made so by weak credentials or application misconfiguration. Brute-forcing can help to reveal information that may have been obscured, or can grant access to a database because the developer forgot to change the default credentials.

There are obvious challenges to brute-forcing. Primarily, it is time-consuming and can be very noisy. Brute-forcing a web service, for example, with the infamous rockyou.txt wordlist will no doubt wake up your friendly neighborhood security operations center (SOC) analyst and may put an end to your activities early. The rockyou...