Black Hat Python, 2nd Edition

5 Web Hackery

The ability to analyze web applications is an absolutely critical skill for any attacker or penetration tester. In most modern networks, web applications present the largest attack surface and therefore are also the most common avenue for gaining access to the web applications themselves.

You’ll find a number of excellent web application tools written in Python, including w3af and sqlmap. Quite frankly, topics such as SQL injection have been beaten to death, and the tooling available is mature enough that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we’ll explore the basics of interacting with the web by using Python and ...