Developer's Guide to Web Application Security

The Tools of the Trade

The hacking community shares a philosophy that data should be free. Not necessarily

free in the sense that everything should be “no charge,” but free in the sense that it

should be open for everyone to pore through and alter to suit his or her own needs.

That certain tools and utilities are distributed in binary form alone is no real obstacle

to the enterprising hacker. A number of tools can be used to help tweeze out the

details of a given program so they can be analyzed for potential vulnerabilities.

Hex Editors

A hexadecimal (hex) editor is a program that is used to view and alter the contents

of binary files. With this utility ...