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

Burp Collaborator


In the previous chapter, we looked at finding obscure vulnerabilities in applications that may not be obvious to attackers. If the application does not flinch when we feed it unexpected input, it could be that it is not vulnerable and the code properly validates input, but it could also mean that a vulnerability exists but it's hidden. To identify these types of vulnerabilities, we passed in a payload that forced the application to connect back to our C2 server.

This is a very useful technique, but the process was manual. We passed in custom payloads and waited for a ping from the server to confirm the existence of a vulnerability. Most application assessments are time-limited and manually checking each input on a large attack surface is not realistic. We have to automate this process.

Luckily, the professional version of Burp Suite allows us to use a Collaborator server infrastructure to help automate finding vulnerabilities out-of-band.

Note

The free version does not support...