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 used a pretty common SQL injection example to showcase potential issues with vulnerability discovery when the application does not provide any kind of feedback to the attacker. There are ways around these types of obstacles and some tricks can even exfiltrate sensitive data asynchronously. We've also looked at how to manually retrieve data through inference in a blind injection scenario.

The key takeaway here is the ability to alter the application behavior in a way that is measurable by the attacker. Even some of the more secure application development environments, which aggressively filter outgoing traffic, tend to allow at least DNS UDP packets to fly through. Filtering egress DNS queries is a difficult exercise and I don't envy any security team charged with doing so. As attackers, once again we are able to take full advantage of these limitations and as I've shown in the earlier example, fully compromise the application by exploiting a difficult-to-discover...