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

Testing for CSRF flaws

The description of the CSRF vulnerability clearly suggests that it is a business logic flaw. An experienced developer would create web applications that would always include a user confirmation screen when performing critical tasks such as changing a password, updating personal details, or when making critical decisions in a financial application such as an online bank account. Testing for business logic flaws is not the job of automated web application scanners, as they work with predefined rules. For example, most of the automated scanners test for the following items to confirm the existence of a CSRF flaw in the URL:

  • Checking for common antiCSRF token names in the request and response
  • Trying to determine whether the application is checking the referrer field by supplying a fake referrer
  • Creating mutants to check whether the application is correctly verifying...