Defending by Attacking: Web Applications for System Administrators you own this product

prerequisites
intermediate web development • basic PHP • basic browser tools • basic command line prompts • basics of shell programming • basics of SQL
skills learned
information gathering • resource enumeration • manual attacks • vulnerability discovery • attack persistence • secure programming
Spiros Antonatos
4 weeks · 5-7 hours per week · BEGINNER
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Look inside
As a systems administrator, you need to be sure the sites, apps, and networks you oversee are safe from attacks. Hackers and other attackers are constantly on the prowl for weaknesses, and one of the best ways to counter them is with penetration testing. These simulated assaults on your own applications reveal hidden weaknesses and let you patch and harden your own defenses before they can be exploited.

In this liveProject, you’ll take on the dual role of both attacker and defender of a vulnerable e-commerce site. You’ll start out by attacking your own systems, using browser development tools to map the attack surface of a website, gaining access with a SQL injection attack, and extracting valuable data. With the flaws in your system revealed, you’ll step into the defensive role to harden your system’s security, set up file monitoring, and work to prevent future attacks. This liveProject comes with full access to a virtual training web application, so you can experiment without endangering your own software.
This project is designed for learning purposes and is not a complete, production-ready application or solution.

project author

Spiros Antonatos
Spiros Antonatos is a lead engineer at Aegis Technologies Pte Ltd, where he works on high-performance threat intelligence products. Previously, he was a research manager at Tenable and a research scientist and manager at IBM Research. He has authored and co-authored 32 conference papers, 4 journal papers, and 12 patents for web security, privacy, and network monitoring. He earned his PhD at the Computer Science Department, University of Crete, Greece.

prerequisites

This liveProject is for system administrators who want to defend their applications against common cyber attacks. No cyber security skills are required to get started. To begin this liveProject, you will need to be familiar with:

TOOLS
  • Basics of PHP programming
  • Basics of browser developer tools
  • Basics of command line prompts
  • Basics of SSH’ing into hosts
  • Basics of wget, nikto, and sqlmap
TECHNIQUES
  • Fundamentals of HTML and HTTP requests/responses
  • Basics of shell programming
  • Basic understanding of SQL
  • Basics of Apache configuration
  • Basics of Postgres user and role management

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