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

Metasploit Framework terminology

Now, let's go through the basic terminology of Metasploit Framework. We will be using these terms often in this book, so it's best to understand them thoroughly before we deep dive into Metasploit Framework (MSF) and its usage:

  • Exploits: When Metasploit starts up, it shows the count of publicly available exploits that are already available in the framework. An exploit is a piece of code that takes advantage of a vulnerability and gives us the desired output.
  • Payload: This is a piece of code that is delivered to the target system or an application via an exploit to perform an act of our choice. Payloads can actually be divided into three main types: singles, stagers, and stages:
    • Singles: These payloads are standalone and are usually used to perform simple tasks, such as opening notepad.exe files and adding users.
    • Stagers: This sets up...