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

An introduction to Tomcat

The Apache Tomcat software is an open source web server that is designed to run Java-based web applications. Some of the features of the current version of Tomcat include the following:

  • Support for Java Servlet 3.1

  • JSP 2.3

  • Java Unified Expression Language (EL) 3.0

  • Java WebSocket 1.0

Tomcat is developed and handled by a number of developers under the auspices of the Apache program platform, released under the Apache Certification 2.0 certificate, and is an open source application. Tomcat can be used as either a standalone product with its own internal web server or in conjunction with other web servers, including Apache and the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS).

Given that Apache Tomcat is used by many organizations, the security aspect of this platform should be considered wisely. At the time of writing this book, Shodan has identified...