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

Extending Burp


Burp Suite is a fantastic attack proxy and it comes with some great features straight out of the box. As mentioned in previous chapters, Intruder is a flexible brute-forcing tool, Repeater allows us to inspect and fine-tune attacks, and Decoder streamlines data manipulation. What makes Burp great is the ability to expand functionality through community-developed and community-maintained extensions. PortSwigger, the creator of Burp Suite, also maintains an online directory for extensions called the BApp Store. The BApp Store can be accessed via the Extender tab in Burp Suite.

Figure 7.1: The BApp Store

With extensions, we can passively check for outdated libraries, custom build sqlmap command-lines, and quickly check for authentication or authorization vulnerabilities.

Burp extensions are typically written in either Java, Python, or Ruby. Since Burp is a Java application, Java extensions will work straight out of the box. For extensions written in Python or Ruby, we need to point...