Chapter 4. Auditing Web Servers

Note

This chapter shows you how to do some things that in many situations might be illegal, unethical, a violation of the terms of service, or just not a good idea. It is provided here to give you information that may be of use to protect yourself against threats and make your own system more secure. Before following these instructions, be sure you are on the right side of the legal and ethical line... use your powers for good!

In this chapter we will cover:

• Listing supported HTTP methods

• Checking if an HTTP proxy is open

• Discovering interesting files and directories on various web servers

• Brute forcing HTTP authentication

• Abusing mod_userdir to enumerate user accounts

• Testing default credentials in web applications

• Brute-force password auditing WordPress installations

• Brute-force password auditing Joomla! installations

• Detecting web application firewalls

• Detecting possible XST vulnerabilities

• Detecting Cross Site Scripting vulnerabilities in web applications

• Finding SQL...