▶Book Description
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.
▶What You Will Learn
⦁ Study the mindset of an attacker
⦁ Adopt defensive strategies
⦁ Classify and plan for standard web application security threats
⦁ Prepare to combat standard system security problems
⦁ Defend WordPress and mobile applications
⦁ Use security tools and plan for defense against remote execution
▶Key Features
⦁ Builds on books and courses on penetration testing for beginners
⦁ Covers both attack and defense perspectives
⦁ Examines which tool to deploy to suit different applications and situations
▶Who This Book Is For
The reader should have basic security experience, for example, through running a network or encountering security issues during application development. Formal education in security is useful, but not required. This title is suitable for people with at least two years of experience in development, network management, or DevOps, or with an established interest in security.
▶What this book covers
⦁ Chapter 1, Introduction to Attacking Web Applications, introduces you to the tools, environments, and the bare minimum ROE we must follow during engagements. We also look at the penetration tester's toolkit and explore cloud as the emerging tool for the web penetration tester.
⦁ Chapter 2, Efficient Discovery, walks you through a journey of improving efficiency in terms of gathering information on a target.
⦁ Chapter 3, Low-Hanging Fruit, clarifies, emphasizes, and exploits the fact that it is very difficult for defenders to get security right all the time, and many simple vulnerabilities often fall through the cracks.
⦁ Chapter 4, Advanced Brute-forcing, discusses brute-forcing in detail, and also explores a couple of techniques for staying under the radar while conducting brute-force attacks during an engagement.
⦁ Chapter 5, File Inclusion Attacks, helps you explore the file inclusion vulnerabilities. We also look at several methods to use an application's underlying filesystem to our advantage.
⦁ Chapter 6, Out-of-Band Exploitation, looks at out-of-band discovery, exploitation of application vulnerabilities, and setting up a command and control infrastructure in the cloud.
⦁ Chapter 7, Automated Testing, helps you automate vulnerability exploitation, including leveraging Burp's Collaborator feature to make out-of-band discovery easier.
⦁ Chapter 8, Bad Serialization, discusses deserialization attacks in detail. We dig deep into this vulnerability type and look at practical exploits.
⦁ Chapter 9, Practical Client-Side Attacks, covers information relating to client-side attacks. We look at the three types of XSS: reflected, stored, and DOM, as well as CSRF, and chaining these attacks together. We also cover the SOP and how it affects loading third-party content or attack code onto the page.
⦁ Chapter 10, Practical Server-Side Attacks, takes you through attacking the server by way of XML, as well as leveraging SSRF to chain attacks and reach further into the network.
⦁ Chapter 11, Attacking APIs, focuses our attention on APIs and how to effectively test and attack them. All of the skills you have learned up to this point will come in handy.
⦁ Chapter 12, Attacking CMS, looks at attacking CMSs and exploring vulnerabilities with them.
⦁ Chapter 13, Breaking Containers, helps you understand how to securely configure Docker containers before deployment with an example of how a compromised containerized CMS led to another container vulnerability that results in full compromise of the host.
