Searching for application passwords
Applications are an enticing target for attackers when they have weaknesses and vulnerabilities in them. How they store credentials can lead to complete system compromise or elevated privileges.
This section will focus on finding and enumerating application credentials. The techniques demonstrated in this section will depend on the type of target you are dealing with and its deployment use case. In our particular case, our target virtual machine has been set up as a server and has various applications installed on it.
In Chapter 3, Gaining Access (Exploitation), we performed a comprehensive Nmap scan on our target and identified several applications, most of which were web applications that utilize some form of authentication. These are some of the applications we can target:
- MySQL Server
- phpMyAdmin
- WordPress
Let's learn how to find and identify the configuration files that are used to store credentials by these...
