Becoming the Hacker

Burp Collaborator

In the previous chapter, we looked at finding obscure vulnerabilities in applications that may not be obvious to attackers. If the application does not flinch when we feed it unexpected input, it could be that it is not vulnerable and the code properly validates input, but it could also mean that a vulnerability exists but it's hidden. To identify these types of vulnerabilities, we passed in a payload that forced the application to connect back to our C2 server.

This is a very useful technique, but the process was manual. We passed in custom payloads and waited for a ping from the server to confirm the existence of a vulnerability. Most application assessments are time-limited and manually checking each input on a large attack ...