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

A common scenario


Imagine that the application http://vuln.app.internal/user.aspx?name=Dade is vulnerable to a SQL injection attack on the name parameter. Traditional payloads and polyglots do not seem to affect the application's response. Perhaps database error messages are disabled and the name value is not processed synchronously by the application.

Somewhere on the backend Microsoft SQL (MS SQL) server, the following query is executed:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE user = 'Dade';

A simple single-quote value for name would produce a SQL error and we'd be in business, but in this case, the error messages are suppressed, so from a client perspective, we'd have no idea something went wrong. Taking it a step further, we can force the application to delay the response by a significant amount of time to confirm the vulnerability:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE user = 'Dade';WAITFOR DELAY '0:0:20' --';

This payload injects a 20 second delay into the query return, which is noticeable enough that it would raise...