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

Async data exfiltration


There is one more challenge with this particular type of vulnerability. Its asynchronous nature makes it impossible to use traditional methods for data exfiltration. While the query may execute successfully and the SQL server will delay the query result, we'd never be able to measure this, as the application that we are targeting does not wait for the SQL server response and returns immediately.

We have to be a bit more clever to extract data and successfully compromise the target. MS SQL server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and others all have ways to accomplish our goal. We'll just go over an MS SQL method, but with a little creativity, any database engine can bend to the attacker's will. It's also important to remember that this method can be used when confirming not just SQL injection vulnerabilities but also XSS and XXE, discussed in other chapters of this book.

Let's go ahead and revisit the method we've used to confirm the vulnerability in the first place. We've passed...