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

Cleaning up


As noted, once an engagement is complete, we have to make sure that we clean up any artifacts that may leave the client exposed. During this attack, we created three files that could be used to attack the client. Although it is unlikely that anyone would be able to use our Weevely shell, it is wise to remove anything left behind. The phpinfo.php test file that we've created should also be deleted. While it doesn't provide any kind of remote access, it does display information that could be used in an attack.

In the same way that we queried the MySQL variables to find out where the application resides on disk, an attacker could use the phpinfo() output to improve the success of a local file inclusion attack, as follows:

ECORP-PRD-API01:C:\xampp\htdocs\xampp $ del test.php phpinfo.php
ECORP-PRD-API01:C:\xampp\htdocs\xampp $ dir
[-][channel] The remote backdoor request triggers an error 404, please verify its availability
[-][channel] The remote backdoor request triggers an error...