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

BeEF


An XSS vulnerability is difficult to exploit successfully in most circumstances. When I'm talking about practical client-side attacks, I don't mean taking a screenshot of the alert(1) popup window for the report!

During an engagement, the XSS vulnerability may be a viable way to attack users and gain a foothold on the network. Conducting XSS attacks can be difficult, as, in most cases, you only have one shot at it. We need to execute code and do everything we have to do before the user closes the browser session. Extracting the session token or other sensitive data is easy enough, but what if we want to take our attack to the next level? Ideally, we want to take full control of the browser and have it do our bidding, perhaps automating some more advanced attacks.

BeEF is a great tool that was created by Wade Alcorn to allow for the easy exploitation of XSS vulnerabilities.

BeEF has a server component that provides command and control. Clients, or zombies, are hooked using a JavaScript...