Metasploit has been a crucial security tool for many years. However, there are only a few modules that Metasploit has made available to the public for pentesting web applications. In this book, you'll explore another aspect of the framework – web applications – which is not commonly used. You'll also discover how Metasploit, when used with its inbuilt GUI, simplifies web application penetration testing.
The book starts by focusing on the Metasploit setup, along with covering the life cycle of the penetration testing process. Then, you will explore Metasploit terminology and the web GUI, which is available in the Metasploit Community Edition. Next, the book will take you through pentesting popular content management systems such as Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla, which will also include studying the latest CVEs and understanding the root cause of vulnerability in detail. Later, you'll gain insights into the vulnerability assessment and exploitation of technological platforms such as JBoss, Jenkins, and Tomcat. Finally, you'll learn how to fuzz web applications to find logical security vulnerabilities using third-party tools.
By the end of this book, you'll have a solid understanding of how to exploit and validate vulnerabilities by working with various tools and techniques.