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

Network assessment


We've seen in previous chapters that Metasploit's workspace feature can be very useful. In the following engagement, we will make use of it as well. First, we have to launch the console from the terminal using the msfconsole command. Once Metasploit has finished loading, it will drop us into the familiar msf > prompt.

root@kali:~# msfconsole
[*] StarTing the Metasploit Framework console...
msf >

As with all engagements involving Metasploit, we start by creating a workspace specifically for the scope:

msf > workspace -a ecorp
[*] Added workspace: ecorp

For this scenario, our target is a black-box API application provided by E Corp. The target host will be api.ecorp.local.

Before we hammer away at the web interface and try to exploit some obscure vulnerability, let's take a step back and see what other services are exposed on the API's server. The hope here is that while the API itself may have been closely scrutinized by developers, who may have taken security seriously...