Becoming the Hacker

Summary

In this chapter, we took a closer look at attacking CMSs, in particular WordPress. While we did pick on WordPress quite heavily, it's important to note that similar issues and vulnerabilities can be found in its competitors' software as well. Drupal and Joomla usually come up in the CMS conversation and they're no strangers to poorly written plugins or badly configured instances.

We were able to assess a target CMS using WPScan and Arachni, and even look at options for privilege escalation or lateral movement once some access was obtained. We also looked at backdooring code to persist our access and even modifying the CMS core source files to exfiltrate cleartext credentials to our C2 server.