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 improving your efficiency for gathering information on a target, and covered several ways to do this. If stealth is paramount during an engagement, efficient content discovery can also reduce the chance that the blue team will notice the attack.

Time-tested tools, such as Nmap and Nikto, can give us a head start, while WPScan and CMSmap can hammer away at complex CMS that are frequently misconfigured and seldom updated. For larger networks, masscan can quickly identify interesting ports, such as those related to web applications, allowing for more specialized tools, such as WhatWeb and WPScan, to do their job faster.

Web content and vulnerability discovery scans with Burp or ZAP can be improved with proper wordlists from repositories, such as SecLists and FuzzDB. These collections of known and interesting URLs, usernames, passwords, and fuzzing payloads can greatly improve scan success and efficiency.

In the next chapter, we will look at how we can leverage...