Testing: Information Gathering

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Information Gathering
Every step about security testing needs a first phase oriented to collection of the information necessary for the correct development of penetration test on web applications. This activity can be carried out to search on different sources and with many methods using public tools as search engine, using fictitious requests purposely forged to receive error messages that give back the versions and technologies used for the application or analyzing and discovering the front-end/back-end infrastructure and applications with the purpose to collect many other useful information. Often it’s possible to gather this information by receiving a response from the application targets because there're old and backup files or default bad configurations not changed from administrators on web server.

Application Discovery: The application discovery testing is an activity oriented to the identification of the web applications hosted on a web server. This analysis is important because many times there isn't a direct link with the main application because they are applications for administration or old web-app used for testing or others never deleted. For these reasons this part of information gathering process is Spidering and googling: Analisys of error code: Infrastructure configuration management testing: SSL/TLS Testing: DB Listener Testing: Application configuration management testing: File extensions handling: Old file testing: 4.2.1 Application Discovery 4.2.2 Spidering and googling 4.2.3 Analisys of error code 4.2.4 Infrastructure configuration management testing 4.2.4.1 SSL/TLS Testing 4.2.4.2 DB Listener Testing 4.2.5 Application configuration management testing 4.2.5.1 File extensions handling 4.2.5.2 Old, backup and unreferenced files

OWASP Testing Guide v2 Table of Contents