Web Application Security

Chapter 28. Part III Summary

Congratulations, you have made it through each major part of Web Application Security. You now have knowledge regarding web application recon, offensive hacking techniques for use against web applications, and defensive mitigations and best practices that can be employed to reduce the risk of your application getting hacked.

You also should have some background on the history of software security and the evolution of hacking. This has been foundational in the lead-up to web application recon, offensive techniques, and defensive mitigations.

A brief summary of the book’s key points and lessons follows.

The History of Software Security

With proper evaluation of historical events, we can see the origins of modern defensive and offensive techniques. From these origins we can better understand the direction in which software has developed, and make use of historical lessons while developing next-generation offensive and defensive techniques.

Telephone phreaking

• In order to scale telephone networks, manual operators were replaced with automation that relied on sound frequencies to connect telephones to each other.

• Early hackers, known as “phreakers,” learned to emulate these frequencies and take advantage of administrative tones that allowed them to place calls without paying for them.

• In response to phreaking, scientists at Bell Labs developed a dual-tone frequency system that was not easily reproducable. For a long period of time, this eliminated ...