Walking an Application

First section in Jr Penetration Tester learning path.

Exploring a Website

Finding interactive website sections is important in recon, a good way to start is explore the website manually and take a note of any interesting pages/areas/features. An example version of this would look like the below:

Feature
URL
Summary

Home Page

/

Summary of what ACME IT Support does, with a staff photo.

Latest News

/news

List of recently published articles, each one has an ID number like article?id=1.

News Article

/news/article?id=1

Displays individual articles, some articles are blocked/reserved for premium customers.

Page Source

Page source can be viewed in most browsers by right-clicking the page and selecting "View Page Source", alternatively you can put "view-source:" in front of the address, like: view-source:https://www.google.com.

In page source you can view HTML code, look for comments left behind by developers, denoted by code that starts with <!-- and ends with -->. Links to other pages can also be seen in anchor tags, these start with <a href and end with </a>.

External files like CSS, JavaScript and images can be included in HTML. These files should lead to a 403 or blank page stating no access. If these are viewable to the public there is a chance they could expose private information to the public.

Developer Tools - Inspector

The inspector allows for live client-side editing of interactive page elements.

Developer Tools - Debugger

Debugger is used for debugging JavaScript, this is called debugger in Firefox and Safari, but is referred to as "Sources" in Google Chrome.

Developer Tools - Network

This tab can be used to keep track of all the external requests a web page makes.

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