Book Image

Becoming the Hacker

By : Adrian Pruteanu
Book Image

Becoming the Hacker

By: Adrian Pruteanu

Overview of this book

Becoming the Hacker will teach you how to approach web penetration testing with an attacker's mindset. While testing web applications for performance is common, the ever-changing threat landscape makes security testing much more difficult for the defender. There are many web application tools that claim to provide a complete survey and defense against potential threats, but they must be analyzed in line with the security needs of each web application or service. We must understand how an attacker approaches a web application and the implications of breaching its defenses. Through the first part of the book, Adrian Pruteanu walks you through commonly encountered vulnerabilities and how to take advantage of them to achieve your goal. The latter part of the book shifts gears and puts the newly learned techniques into practice, going over scenarios where the target may be a popular content management system or a containerized application and its network. Becoming the Hacker is a clear guide to web application security from an attacker's point of view, from which both sides can benefit.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Becoming the Hacker
Contributors
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we looked at different ways we can make attacking APIs easier. We described the two most common standards for web services, SOAP and REST. We looked at how authentication is handled and what role JWTs play in secure communication. We explored tools and extensions that help make us more efficient.

We also played around with Postman and the idea of automating discovery, and the testing of API inputs and endpoints.

APIs may be the latest trend for web and mobile applications, but they're not that different from the usual HTTP application. In fact, as we saw earlier, microservice architecture brings about some new challenges when it comes to authentication, which can be exploited alongside the usual server-side and client-side vulnerabilities. Coming up in the next chapter, we will look at CMSs, and some ways to discover and subvert them for fun and profit.