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.

4.2.1 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 and for this reason a discovery analysis is useful to notice every web-app used for administration, old versions or others never deleted and created for a test development phase.

4.2.2 Spidering and googling

This phase of the Information Gathering process consists in a browsing and capturing of the resources find on the web but the operations that are possibile to perform in this analysis consist also in the collection of the information available on the search engines and extractable using the their particular functionalities.

4.2.3 Analisys of error code

The web applications provide during a penetration test many information (as error codes) about technologies and products using particular requests forged expressly for this scope. Often to find these information it isn't need to have particular skills because the web applications with errors on the source code or with infrastructural problems provide these data themselves.

4.2.4 Infrastructure configuration management testing

Often an analysis on the infrastructure and topology architecture can reveal a lot of information about a web application as source code, HTTP methods allowed, administration functionalities, authentication methods and infrastructural configurations. For this reason a verify only on the web applications can't be an exhaustive test considering the very large number of information that it's possible to obtain during a security assessment analyzing all the components present in a network.

4.2.4.1 SSL/TLS Testing

4.2.4.2 DB Listener Testing

During the configuration of a database server many DBA administrators don't consider the importance of the security about DB Listener which reveals sensible data as some kinds of configurations and database istances running. The collection of these information can provide the needful elements to compromise the reserve, integrity and availability of the data stored.

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