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

Command and control


There are many cloud providers and thanks to competition, they are fairly cheap. We don't need a beefy machine: we can get away with a micro instance from any of these providers:

  • Google Cloud

  • Amazon AWS

  • Microsoft Azure

  • DigitalOcean

Google Cloud and Amazon AWS have tiers that provide you with all the VM resources you need for free; for a limited time, of course. However, the few dollars a month it costs to run VMs in the cloud is well worth it for those of us who rely on C2 infrastructure.

Note

These C2 instances should also be a per-client deployment and the disks should be encrypted. Due to the nature of our work, sensitive customer data may flow in and could be stored insecurely. Once an engagement is complete, destroy the instance, along with any client data it may have collected.

Once the VM is up and running, it is usually assigned an ephemeral external IP address. In some cases, you can request a static IP, but this is generally not required. Ephemeral external IPs will...