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

Summary


In this chapter, we've continued to showcase how difficult it is to get security right all of the time. Unfortunately, this has been, and always will be, a reality for most companies. As professional attackers, however, we thrive on this.

In our scenario, we did not tackle the application head on, spending countless hours interacting with the API and looking for a way to compromise it. Instead, we assumed that the bulk of the security-hardening effort was spent on the application itself, and we banked on the fact that, understandably, securing a server or development environment, and keeping it secure, is a difficult task.

Often, the application development lifecycle tends to focus developers and administrators on the application code itself, while auxiliary systems controls are neglected. The operating system is not patched, the firewall is wide open, and development database instances expose the application to a slew of simple, yet effective, attacks.

In this chapter, we looked at...