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 5. File Inclusion Attacks

In previous chapters, we looked at setting up our environment and getting to know our tools. We even discussed attacking applications by looking for low-hanging fruit. In the same spirit, in this chapter, we will be analyzing file inclusion and upload attacks. While these types of attacks are not terribly sophisticated, they are still common. File inclusion vulnerabilities have seemingly been around forever and don't appear to be going away anytime soon. Local File Inclusion (LFI) and Remote File Inclusion (RFI) vulnerabilities are not the only ways to take advantage of the application and compromise it. File upload vulnerabilities can be abused, even if the developers have restricted the upload of executable server-side code, as we will see later in the chapter. There is still a surprising amount of applications that are vulnerable to LFI, file upload abuse, and sometimes even RFI.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • RFI

  • LFI

  • File upload abuse...