Book Image

Hands-On Application Penetration Testing with Burp Suite

By : Carlos A. Lozano, Dhruv Shah, Riyaz Ahemed Walikar
Book Image

Hands-On Application Penetration Testing with Burp Suite

By: Carlos A. Lozano, Dhruv Shah, Riyaz Ahemed Walikar

Overview of this book

Burp suite is a set of graphic tools focused towards penetration testing of web applications. Burp suite is widely used for web penetration testing by many security professionals for performing different web-level security tasks. The book starts by setting up the environment to begin an application penetration test. You will be able to configure the client and apply target whitelisting. You will also learn to setup and configure Android and IOS devices to work with Burp Suite. The book will explain how various features of Burp Suite can be used to detect various vulnerabilities as part of an application penetration test. Once detection is completed and the vulnerability is confirmed, you will be able to exploit a detected vulnerability using Burp Suite. The book will also covers advanced concepts like writing extensions and macros for Burp suite. Finally, you will discover various steps that are taken to identify the target, discover weaknesses in the authentication mechanism, and finally break the authentication implementation to gain access to the administrative console of the application. By the end of this book, you will be able to effectively perform end-to-end penetration testing with Burp Suite.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Contributors
About Packt
Preface
12
Exploiting and Exfiltrating Data from a Large Shipping Corporation
Index

Stages of an application pentest


It is trivial to understand the stages of an application pentest as it lays the groundwork and ensures that the pentester covers all the possible endpoints and does an efficient scan. A web application pentest is broadly categorized in the following stages:

  • Planning and reconnaissance
  • Client end code analysis
  • Manual testing 
  • Automated testing
  • Exploiting discovered issues 
  • Digging deep for data exfiltration
  •  Taking shells
  • Reporting

 

Among these stages, the planning and reconnaissance stage is the most important stage, as there are possibilities that a tester might miss out critical entry endpoints into the application, and those areas might go untested. Let's explore in a little more detail what happens in each stage.

Planning and reconnaissance

In the planning and reconnaissance phase, we define the scope of the penetration test. This initial phase requires a lot of planning, and you need to answer questions, such as:

  • What is the scope of the pentest?
  • What are the restricted...