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

Foothold


Interacting with the web application provided by the Docker VM, we notice it is running a WordPress instance:

Figure 13.4: WordPress application served by the VM

The next step in our attack will be running the wpscan tool and looking for any low-hanging fruit, and gathering as much information about the instance as possible.

Note

The wpscan tool is available on Kali and almost any other penetration-testing-focused distribution. The latest version can be pulled from https://github.com/wpscanteam/wpscan.

We can start our attack by issuing a wpscan command in the attack machine terminal. By default, passive detection will be enabled to look for available plugins, as well as various other rudimentary checks. We can point the scanner to our application using the --url switch, passing the full URL, including the port 8000, as the value.

root@kali:~# wpscan --url http://vulndocker.internal:8000/
[+] robots.txt available under: 'http://vulndocker.internal:8000/robots.txt'
[+] Interesting entry...