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 3. Low-Hanging Fruit

It is often the case that clients will approach security professionals with a request to perform an application penetration test. In many engagements, there is not a lot of information given to the tester, if any at all, prompting a black-box approach to testing. This can make testing more difficult, especially when open-source intelligence isn't of much help or the interface is not intuitive, or user friendly, which is sometimes the case with an API.

In the scenario presented in this chapter, we are faced with this exact problem, which is commonly encountered in the wild. Instead of deep diving into the inner workings of the API and attempting to reverse engineer its functionality without much prior knowledge, we can start by looking for low-hanging fruit. We hope that if we take the road less travelled by the security team, we can eventually reach the open back window and bypass the four-foot thick steel door protecting the entrance.

In this chapter, we will...