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 covered lots of information relating to client-side attacks. We looked at the three more common types of XSS: reflected, stored, and DOM, as well as CSRF, and chaining these attacks together. We also covered the SOP and how it affects loading third-party content or attack code onto the page.

The chapter showcased the built-in BeEF keylogger and even showed how to create your own. Using social engineering, we were able to trick the user into executing malicious code, giving us reverse shell access to the client's machine. Persistence is a real problem with XSS in particular, but using MITB attacks, we managed to extend our foothold on the client. Finally, we explored automating exploitation with BeEF's ARE and we even tunneled HTTP traffic through a victim's browser.

The purpose of this chapter was to show that client-side attacks can be practical in a real-world attack. Even though we are not executing native code, XSS and CSRF attacks can be combined to do some...