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

XSS


Another prevalent type of attack that I still encounter out in the field very frequently is XSS. XSS comes in a few flavors, but they all provide attackers with the same thing: arbitrary JavaScript code execution in the client's browser.

While this may not sound as great as executing code on the actual application server, XSS attacks can be devastating when used in targeted attacks.

Reflected XSS

The more common type of XSS vulnerability is the reflected or non-persistent kind. A reflected XSS attack happens when the application accepts input from the user, either via parameters in the URL, body, or HTTP headers, and it returns it back to the user without sanitizing it first. This type of attack is referred to as non-persistent because once the user navigates away from the vulnerable page, or they close the browser, the exploit is over. Reflected XSS attacks typically require some social engineering due to the ephemeral nature of the payload.

Note

To showcase XSS attacks, we will once again...