Chapter 3. Low-Hanging Fruit
It is often the case that clients will approach security professionals with a request to perform an application penetration test. In many engagements, there is not a lot of information given to the tester, if any at all, prompting a black-box approach to testing. This can make testing more difficult, especially when open-source intelligence isn't of much help or the interface is not intuitive, or user friendly, which is sometimes the case with an API.
In the scenario presented in this chapter, we are faced with this exact problem, which is commonly encountered in the wild. Instead of deep diving into the inner workings of the API and attempting to reverse engineer its functionality without much prior knowledge, we can start by looking for low-hanging fruit. We hope that if we take the road less travelled by the security team, we can eventually reach the open back window and bypass the four-foot thick steel door protecting the entrance.
In this...
