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

SOP


Consider a scenario where a target is logged into their Gmail account (mail.google.com) in one of the open browser tabs. In another tab, they navigate to a different site, on a different domain, which contains attacker code that wants access to that Gmail data. Maybe they were socially engineered to visit this particular site or maybe they were redirected there through a malicious advertising (malvertising) campaign on a well-known news site.

The attacker code may try to open a connection to the mail.google.com domain, and because the victim is already authenticated in the other browser tab, the code should be able to read and send emails as well by forging requests to Gmail. JavaScript provides all the tools necessary to accomplish all of this, so why isn't everything on fire?

The answer, as we will see in detail shortly, is because of the SOP. The SOP prevents this exact attack and, unless the attacker can inject their code directly into mail.google.com, they will not be able to read...