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


Container technology has many benefits, which makes it an important topic. Docker is revolutionary in the way it handles container images and deployment. As attackers, we have to look at all new technology with the hacker mindset. How can we break it and how can we use it to gain access that we didn't have before?

If a business switches from VMs to containers in the hope of reducing costs, while assuming they provide the same protection, the company is exposing itself to cross-application attacks that were difficult, if not impossible, before.

In this chapter, we saw how compromising a simple containerized CMS led to access to another container, which eventually resulted in full compromise of the host. This is not to say that Docker and container technology should be avoided, but just like any other software, Docker must be configured securely before deployment. A vulnerable or improperly configured container could allow attackers to pivot to other more sensitive applications, or worse...