Hands-On Web Penetration Testing with Metasploit

▶Book Description
Metasploit has been a crucial security tool for many years. However, there are only a few modules that Metasploit has made available to the public for pentesting web applications. In this book, you'll explore another aspect of the framework – web applications – which is not commonly used. You'll also discover how Metasploit, when used with its inbuilt GUI, simplifies web application penetration testing.

The book starts by focusing on the Metasploit setup, along with covering the life cycle of the penetration testing process. Then, you will explore Metasploit terminology and the web GUI, which is available in the Metasploit Community Edition. Next, the book will take you through pentesting popular content management systems such as Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla, which will also include studying the latest CVEs and understanding the root cause of vulnerability in detail. Later, you'll gain insights into the vulnerability assessment and exploitation of technological platforms such as JBoss, Jenkins, and Tomcat. Finally, you'll learn how to fuzz web applications to find logical security vulnerabilities using third-party tools.

By the end of this book, you'll have a solid understanding of how to exploit and validate vulnerabilities by working with various tools and techniques.

▶What You Will Learn
- Get up to speed with setting up and installing the Metasploit framework
- Gain first-hand experience of the Metasploit web interface
- Use Metasploit for web-application reconnaissance
- Understand how to pentest various content management systems
- Pentest platforms such as JBoss, Tomcat, and Jenkins
- Become well-versed with fuzzing web applications
- Write and automate penetration testing reports

▶Key Features
- Get up to speed with Metasploit and discover how to use it for pentesting
- Understand how to exploit and protect your web environment effectively
- Learn how an exploit works and what causes vulnerabilities

▶Who This Book Is For
This book is for web security analysts, bug bounty hunters, security professionals, or any stakeholder in the security sector who wants to delve into web application security testing. Professionals who are not experts with command line tools or Kali Linux and prefer Metasploit's graphical user interface (GUI) will also find this book useful. No experience with Metasploit is required, but basic knowledge of Linux and web application pentesting will be helpful.

▶What this book covers
- Chapter 1, Introduction to Web Application Penetration Testing, covers the setup and installation of Metasploit, along with pentesting life cycles, the OWASP Top 10, and the Sans Top 25, in detail.

- Chapter 2, Metasploit Essentials, explains the basics of Metasploit, from installation to exploitation. The basic Metasploit terminologies and other less commonly used options in Metasploit are also covered.

- Chapter 3, The Metasploit Web Interface, focuses on a walkthrough of the Metasploit web GUI interface, which is available in Metasploit Community Edition, before we dive into other topics.

- Chapter 4, Using Metasploit for Reconnaissance, covers the first process in a penetration testing life cycle: reconnaissance. From banner grabbing to WEBDAV recon, a basic reconnaissance process will be explained with the help of particular Metasploit modules used for this.

- Chapter 5, Web Application Enumeration Using Metasploit, focuses on one of the most important processes in web application penetration testing, in other words, enumeration. The chapter will start with the very basics of file and directory enumeration, before proceeding to crawling and scraping from a website, and then further enumeration involving Metasploit modules.

- Chapter 6, Vulnerability Scanning Using WMAP, covers the WMAP module of the Metasploit Framework for scanning web applications.

- Chapter 7, Vulnerability Assessment Using Metasploit (Nessus), covers the utilization of the Nessus vulnerability scanner via Metasploit to perform vulnerability assessment scanning on a target.

- Chapter 8, Pentesting CMSes – WordPress, covers the enumeration of vulnerabilities for WordPress and how to exploit them.

- Chapter 9, Pentesting CMSes – Joomla, covers the enumeration of vulnerabilities for Joomla and how to exploit them.

- Chapter 10, Pentesting CMSes – Drupal, covers the enumeration of vulnerabilities for Drupal and how to exploit them.

- Chapter 11, Penetration Testing on Technological Platforms – JBoss, covers methods for enumerating, exploiting, and gaining access to a JBoss server.

- Chapter 12, Penetration Testing on Technological Platforms – Apache Tomcat, covers methods for enumerating, exploiting, and gaining access to a Tomcat server.

- Chapter 13, Penetration Testing on Technological Platforms – Jenkins, covers methods for enumerating, exploiting, and gaining access to a server running Jenkins.

- Chapter 14, Web Application Fuzzing – Logical Bug Hunting, focuses on exploiting flaws that exist in the business logic of the web application. We will cover in-depth examples of these, along with methods for fuzzing a web application in order to identify a vulnerability.

- Chapter 15, Writing Penetration Testing Reports, covers the basics of report writing and how different tools can be used to automate the report-writing process.