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

CSRF


Earlier, I briefly mentioned that browsers will pass along all associated cookies to applications automatically. For example, if the user has authenticated to the http://email.site application, a session cookie will be created, which can be used to make authenticated requests. A CSRF attack takes advantage of this user experience feature to abuse overly-trusting applications.

It is common for applications to allow users to update their profile with custom values that are passed via GET or POST requests. The application will, of course, check to see whether the request is authenticated and perhaps even sanitize the input to prevent SQLi or XSS attacks.

Consider a scenario where we've tricked the victim into visiting a malicious site, or perhaps we've embedded some JavaScript code in a known-good site. This particular piece of code is designed to perform a CSRF attack and target the http://email.site application.

As attackers, we've done some digging and realized that the email application...