Improving your Penetration Testing Skills

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Title Page

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Improving your Penetration Testing Skills

About Packt

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Contributors

About the authors

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Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

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Download the example code files

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Conventions used

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Introduction to Penetration Testing and Web Applications

Proactive security testing

Different testing methodologies

Ethical hacking

Penetration testing

Vulnerability assessment

Security audits

Considerations when performing penetration testing

Rules of Engagement

The type and scope of testing

Client contact details

Client IT team notifications

Sensitive data handling

Status meeting and reports

The limitations of penetration testing

The need for testing web applications

Reasons to guard against attacks on web applications

Kali Linux

A web application overview for penetration testers

HTTP protocol

Knowing an HTTP request and response

The request header

The response header

HTTP methods

The GET method

The POST method

The HEAD method

The TRACE method

The PUT and DELETE methods

The OPTIONS method

Keeping sessions in HTTP

Cookies

Cookie flow between server and client

Persistent and nonpersistent cookies

Cookie parameters

HTML data in HTTP response

The server-side code

Multilayer web application

Three-layer web application design

Web services

Introducing SOAP and REST web services

HTTP methods in web services

XML and JSON

AJAX

Building blocks of AJAX

The AJAX workflow

HTML5

WebSockets

Setting Up Your Lab with Kali Linux

Kali Linux

Latest improvements in Kali Linux

Installing Kali Linux

Virtualizing Kali Linux versus installing it on physical hardware

Installing on VirtualBox

Creating the virtual machine

Installing the system

Important tools in Kali Linux

CMS & Framework Identification

WPScan

JoomScan

CMSmap

Web Application Proxies

Burp Proxy

Customizing client interception

Modifying requests on the fly

Burp Proxy with HTTPS websites

Zed Attack Proxy

ProxyStrike

Web Crawlers and Directory Bruteforce

DIRB

DirBuster

Uniscan

Web Vulnerability Scanners

Nikto

w3af

Skipfish

Other tools

OpenVAS

Database exploitation

Web application fuzzers

Using Tor for penetration testing