Exploiting Vulnerabilities

Sixteenth section in Jr Penetration Tester learning path.

Automated vs Manual Vulnerability Scanning

A myriad of tools are available for vulnerability scanning - ranging from commercial (heavy costs) to open-source and free. Vulnerability scanners are a convenient means of canvassing an application for flaws.

Using a vulnerability scanner comes with various advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages	Disadvantages
Automated scans are easily repeated and results can be easily shared.	Can build reliance on these tools.
Scanners and quick and can test multiple apps efficiently.	These are very loud and produce lots of traffic and logs, not good for avoiding detection.
Open-source versions exist.	Open-source versions are often very basic and require expensive licenses to be useful.
Automated scanners cover a wide range of vulnerabilities that can be hard to manually search for.	They often do not find every vulnerability available.

Manual scanning is often the way to go when testing an individual app or program. Ultimately, both techniques involve testing for vulnerabilities including:

Vulnerability	Description
Security Misconfiguration	Due to developer oversight, for example, exposing server info in messages between the app and an attacker.
Broken Access Control	An attacker can access parts of an app they should not be able to.
Insecure Deserialisation	Insecure processing of data sent across an application, attacker may be able to pass malicious code to the app.
Injection	An attacker is able to input malicious data due to lack of input sanitisation.