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

Obfuscating code


The Laudanum shell generated by CO2 in the previous section worked just fine, but if a defender looks a little too closely at the source code, it will definitely raise some red flags. Ideally, we want to keep the file size as small as possible and try to make the code more difficult to analyze. The comments, the properly indented code, and descriptive variable names make figuring out what ads.php actually does a breeze.

Let's make analysis a bit more complicated. Code obfuscators are commonly used in digital rights management software, anti-piracy modules, and of course, malware. While no code obfuscator will stop an experienced reverse engineer, it certainly does slow things down; perhaps long enough for us to move on to another server or application, but at least long enough to evade antivirus signatures. Ideally, we remove the comments, rename the variables, and try to hide the shell's actual functionality, but it's not a good idea to do this manually. Human error can...