Black Hat Python

Chapter 5. Web Hackery

Analyzing web applications is absolutely critical for an attacker or penetration tester. In most modern networks, web applications present the largest attack surface and so are also the most common avenue for gaining access. There are a number of excellent web application tools that have been written in Python, including w3af, sqlmap, and others. 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 using Python, and then build on this knowledge to create reconnaissance and brute-force tooling. You’ll see how HTML parsing can be useful in creating brute forcers, ...