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


This chapter showcased a number of tools and techniques that work together to make an otherwise-tedious part of the engagement seamless. Burp Suite, or the free alternative OWASP ZAP, both provide ways to extend functionality and make quick work of repetitive tasks.

We've also looked at an easy way to obfuscate code that may end up on a target system. When dropping a custom shell on a server, it's a good idea to hide its true function. A passing blue teamer may not look twice if the code looks overly complex. We've used tools to quickly transform our generated backdoor into a less conspicuous output.

Finally, building on the previous chapter's out-of-band vulnerability discovery techniques, we leveraged Burp's Collaborator server to streamline the whole process. Collaborator is an indispensable tool and, if possible, should always be enabled when attacking web applications. In the next chapter, we will switch gears and look at exploiting an interesting class of vulnerabilities related...