Web Server Hacking

Abstract

Organizational web servers reflect the public image of an organization and serve web pages/information to organizational clients via web browsers using HTTP protocol. Some of the web server software may contain web applications that enable users to perform high-level tasks, such as querying a database and delivering the output through the web server to the client browser as an HTML file. Hackers always try to exploit the different vulnerabilities or flaws existing in web servers and web applications, which can pose a big threat for an organization. This chapter provides the importance of protecting web servers and applications along with the different tools used for analyzing the security of web servers and web applications. The chapter also introduces different web attacks that are carried out by an attacker either to gain illegal access to the web server data or reduce the availability of web services. The web server attacks includes denial of service (DOS) attacks, buffer overflow exploits, website defacement with sql injection (SQLi) attacks, cross site scripting (XSS) attacks, remote file inclusion (RFI) attacks, directory traversal attacks, phishing attacks, brute force attacks, source code disclosure attacks, session hijacking, parameter form tampering, man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, HTTP response splitting attacks, cross-site request forgery (XSRF), lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) attacks, and hidden field manipulation attacks. The chapter explains different web server and web application testing tools and vulnerability scanners including Nikto, BurpSuite, Paros, IBM AppScan, Fortify, Accunetix, and ZAP. Finally, the chapter also discusses countermeasures to be implemented while designing any web application for any organization in order to reduce the risk.