Grokking Web Application Security

front matter

foreword

I’ve hacked just about everything that’s walked or crawled on this planet at one time or another. From my first hack of a fellow systems administrator’s root password (authorized, of course) in 1989 to taking over an insulin pump and dispensing all the pump’s insulin on the keynote stage of RSA 2012, I have made it my purpose to expose the world of the adversary—how an attacker thinks and works. After all, education is the final bastion of hope we have to prevent cyberattacks.

When I wrote my first book, Hacking Exposed: Network Secrets and Solutions, in 1999, I knew how important content on adversaries was to administrators. So I quickly cowrote one of the first textbooks on applying these hacking techniques to the new ...