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 several methods for using an application's underlying filesystem to our advantage. We were able to get code execution using file inclusion and even attack the client using XSS vulnerabilities that we introduced ourselves.

Application development frameworks are maturing and, thankfully, some even take security seriously. As previously mentioned, there will always be a trade-off between security and usability. A file sharing site can be completely secure, but if it only allows a small number of extensions, it isn't very usable. This is a weakness that we, as attackers, can exploit for profit.

In the next chapter, we we will look at out-of-band discovery and exploitation of application vulnerabilities.