Book Image

Improving your Penetration Testing Skills

By : Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez, Juned Ahmed Ansari, Daniel Teixeira, Abhinav Singh
Book Image

Improving your Penetration Testing Skills

By: Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez, Juned Ahmed Ansari, Daniel Teixeira, Abhinav Singh

Overview of this book

Penetration testing (or ethical hacking) is a legal and foolproof way to identify vulnerabilities in your system. With thorough penetration testing, you can secure your system against the majority of threats. This Learning Path starts with an in-depth explanation of what hacking and penetration testing are. You’ll gain a deep understanding of classical SQL and command injection flaws, and discover ways to exploit these flaws to secure your system. You'll also learn how to create and customize payloads to evade antivirus software and bypass an organization's defenses. Whether it’s exploiting server vulnerabilities and attacking client systems, or compromising mobile phones and installing backdoors, this Learning Path will guide you through all this and more to strengthen your defense against online attacks. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll have the knowledge and skills you need to invade a system and identify all its vulnerabilities. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt books: • Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux - Third Edition by Juned Ahmed Ansari and Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez • Metasploit Penetration Testing Cookbook - Third Edition by Abhinav Singh , Monika Agarwal, et al.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page

Cross-Site Request Forgery, Identification, and Exploitation

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is often mistakenly perceived as a vulnerability that is similar to XSS. XSS exploits the trust a user has in a particular site, which makes the user believe any information presented by the website. On the other hand, CSRF exploits the trust that a website has in a user's browser, which has the website execute any request coming from an authenticated session without verifying if the user wanted to perform that specific action.

In a CSRF attack, the attacker makes authenticated users perform unwanted actions in the web application in which they are authenticated. This is accomplished through an external site that the user visits, which triggers these actions.

CSRF can exploit every web application function that requires a single request within an authenticated session if sufficient...