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

Behind seven proxies


These days, it is fairly common for more mature companies to implement IDS, intrusion prevention systems (IPS), and security information and event management (SIEM) with alerting for when they detect abuse against a particular application. When an unknown IP is performing too many operations in a short time on a protected application, IDS or IPS may take action against the source. If we are conducting a password spraying attack, we may avoid lockouts but we're still hammering the server from one source: our machine.

A good way to evade these types of detection systems is to distribute the connection requests from the attacker machine over many IPs, which is commonly done by malicious actors through networks of compromised hosts. With the advent of cloud computing and computing time becoming increasingly cheap, even free in some cases, we don't have to stray outside of the law and build a botnet. The Tor network is also a free and effective way to change the public IP...