Book Image

Learning Python Web Penetration Testing

By : Christian Martorella
Book Image

Learning Python Web Penetration Testing

By: Christian Martorella

Overview of this book

Web penetration testing is the use of tools and code to attack a website or web app in order to assess its vulnerability to external threats. While there are an increasing number of sophisticated, ready-made tools to scan systems for vulnerabilities, the use of Python allows you to write system-specific scripts, or alter and extend existing testing tools to find, exploit, and record as many security weaknesses as possible. Learning Python Web Penetration Testing will walk you through the web application penetration testing methodology, showing you how to write your own tools with Python for each activity throughout the process. The book begins by emphasizing the importance of knowing how to write your own tools with Python for web application penetration testing. You will then learn to interact with a web application using Python, understand the anatomy of an HTTP request, URL, headers and message body, and later create a script to perform a request, and interpret the response and its headers. As you make your way through the book, you will write a web crawler using Python and the Scrappy library. The book will also help you to develop a tool to perform brute force attacks in different parts of the web application. You will then discover more on detecting and exploiting SQL injection vulnerabilities. By the end of this book, you will have successfully created an HTTP proxy based on the mitmproxy tool.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Adding more information

In this section, we'll continue adding features to our BruteForcer in order to improve detection and to facilitate filtering.

First, we're going to add the code that will detect whether there was a redirection, then we're going to add the time it took for the request response transaction and the MD5 hash of the response. Finally, we're going to test the improved script.

Currently, the requests library returns a 200 status code for resources that follow the redirection as it is returning the status code from the last resource in the redirection chain. If we want to know whether there was a redirection, we need to check the history of requests:

  1. Let's go back to the Atom editor and open the file forzaBruta-3.py. We need to add this code in order to improve the redirection detection.
  2. After line 48, we get the request response. This...