How to Attack and Defend Your Website

Introduction

When you are trying to build a secure website or web application, it helps to see the problem through the eyes of the adversary, to understand the weaknesses that can be used to attack a website. Therefore, the goal of this book is to teach you how to hack websites. Through hands-on exercises we will show you several of the most common weaknesses and how they can be exploited by an attacker – in this case, you. After you learn this, you will be better prepared to protect your own, your clients’ or your employer’s websites from these types of attacks.

We will start by learning the basic web technology stack, and then we will delve a little deeper and talk about the HTTP protocol. Central to this book is being able to understand ...