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 6. Out-of-Band Exploitation

In the previous chapter, we looked at confirming and exploiting file inclusion attacks. The confirmation piece was straightforward, since the server immediately made it obvious that the application was vulnerable. What happens when things are not so clear? What if the server is vulnerable but does not show any indication of it when given unexpected input? When testing for the existence of, say, a SQL injection vulnerability, attackers will usually feed specially crafted values into the input and observe the application's behavior. Sometimes, if they are lucky, the server returns a bright-red SQL error message, which can indicate the existence of an injection point.

As applications and frameworks get more complex, production applications are hardened and the behavioral hints that we used to rely on to confirm a vulnerability are no longer as obvious. Modern applications tend to suppress error messages by default and may not always process the input synchronously...