Ethical Hacking of Web Servers

Web servers are one of those things defenders are always trying to stay one step ahead of and attackers look for first. Web servers and services are pretty common within organizations and tend to show up in one of three ways. The first is with organizations’ intranet as a place to distribute company information and provide links to other resources. The second is the internet, with not only websites but web services and portals for the use of clients. This may contain public company information or, depending on the type of organization, it may provide systems for order processing or account information. The third is through applications and services; this might be an application that provides a web portal to access information, or it may even be a cloud-based service. This will be explored in greater detail in Chapter 14.

Web servers and services, by themselves, do not do much; however, it is when interactivity with users is enabled that the...