Book Image

Hands-On Web Penetration Testing with Metasploit

By : Harpreet Singh, Himanshu Sharma
Book Image

Hands-On Web Penetration Testing with Metasploit

By: Harpreet Singh, Himanshu Sharma

Overview of this book

Metasploit has been a crucial security tool for many years. However, there are only a few modules that Metasploit has made available to the public for pentesting web applications. In this book, you'll explore another aspect of the framework – web applications – which is not commonly used. You'll also discover how Metasploit, when used with its inbuilt GUI, simplifies web application penetration testing. The book starts by focusing on the Metasploit setup, along with covering the life cycle of the penetration testing process. Then, you will explore Metasploit terminology and the web GUI, which is available in the Metasploit Community Edition. Next, the book will take you through pentesting popular content management systems such as Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla, which will also include studying the latest CVEs and understanding the root cause of vulnerability in detail. Later, you'll gain insights into the vulnerability assessment and exploitation of technological platforms such as JBoss, Jenkins, and Tomcat. Finally, you'll learn how to fuzz web applications to find logical security vulnerabilities using third-party tools. By the end of this book, you'll have a solid understanding of how to exploit and validate vulnerabilities by working with various tools and techniques.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Introduction
5
The Pentesting Life Cycle with Metasploit
10
Pentesting Content Management Systems (CMSes)
14
Performing Pentesting on Technological Platforms
18
Logical Bug Hunting

Joomla exploitation using Metasploit

Once all the enumeration and version detection is done, it's time for the exploitation. In this section, we will look at some of the ways that Joomla can be exploited. The first one is the well-known SQL injection vulnerability applied in Joomla to gain Remote Code Execution (RCE). A Metasploit module is available for this and we can use it by executing the use exploit/unix/webapp/joomla_comfields_sqli_rce command, as in the following screenshot:

Before running the exploit, let's see how it works.

How does the exploit work?

The following SQL query is sent to the server, which returns a Base64-encoded value of the table name prefix:

This can be seen as follows:

(UPDATEXML(2170...