Hands-On Bug Hunting for Penetration Testers: A practical guide to help ethical hackers discover web application security flaws

Your guide to discovering, testing, and documenting common web application vulnerabilities

Key Features

• Learn how to test for common bugs
• Discover tools and methods for hacking ethically
• Understand how to work on pentesting engagements step by step

Book Description

With the news of security breaches and vulnerabilities being exploited every day, enhancing application security through bug bounties has become a critical part of the security economy. This book will show you how you can participate profitably in bug bounty programs.

Starting with an introduction to bug bounty concepts, this book will help you evaluate programs and guide you in preparing for pentesting. You'll then learn about SQLi, NoSQLi, XSS, XXE, and other forms of injecting code. As you progress, you'll create CSRF PoC HTML snippets, discover hidden content (and understand what to do with it once it's found), and develop the tools for automated pentesting work?ows. This book not only covers detailed walk-throughs of discovering and testing vulnerabilities, but also aids in reporting them. You'll learn how to format the information within the context of a bug report that can increase the chances of earning you cash.

By the end of this bug bounty book, you'll have developed the skills you need to identify and participate in the best bug bounty programs and advance in freelance security research.

What you will learn

• Choose which bug bounty programs to engage in
• Minimize your legal liability and practice bug hunting ethically
• Understand how to take notes that will make compiling your submission report easier
• Discover how to take an XSS vulnerability from discovery to verification, and report the submission
• Automate CSRF PoC generation with Python
• Perform CSRF detection with Burp Suite
• Use WP Scan and other tools to find vulnerabilities in WordPress, Django, and Ruby on Rails applications
• Write your report in a way that will help you earn bigger rewards

Who this book is for

This book is for developers, hobbyists, pentesters, and anyone with an interest (and some experience) in web application security.

Table of Contents

1. Joining the Hunt
2. Choosing Your Hunting Ground
3. Preparing for an Engagement
4. Unsanitized Data – An XSS Case Study
5. SQL, Code Injection, and Scanners
6. CSRF and Insecure Session Authentication
7. Detecting XML External Entities
8. Access Control and Security Through Obscurity
9. Framework and Application-Specific Vulnerabilities
10. Formatting Your Report
11. Other Tools
12. Other (Out of Scope) Vulnerabilities
13. Going Further