Two posts ago, I wrote a quick post about installing OWASP’s Broken Web App. This post will be about exploiting the BWA and by that I mean I’m sharing my experience following existing proof of concepts and walkthroughs. For example, reported vulnerabilities from sourceforge and video walkthroughs on irongeek.com. This post assumes you have the OWASP BWA virtual machine up and running and that your target VM’s IP address is mapped to owaspbwa.

OWASP Broken Web App (BWA) is a safe place to practice some fun stuff and is basically a collection of applications to test everything security related. OWASP has a few projects like Web Goat, Security Shepherd, and more. Broken Web Apps is a collection of these guides and some outdated apps to test your developing skills. Install All The Things! In order to set things up, it’s important to have everything you need installed.

Ok, lets review, we know our basics. We know how to use a computer, we know how to write code, we know what unix systems like Linux are, and we know how to use Unix tools like those provided in Kali. Wait, I still can’t get into my friends Facebook account, what are we really learning anyways? Well giant corporations like Google or Facebook are hard to hack, especially for people new to hacking like us.

Everyone wants to break into their neighbors wifi or steal someones password at Starbucks, but depending on National, State, and local law, even packet sniffing could be illegal. So how do we safely practice how to hack before we are ready to find Sony’s back door? We set up a environment for virtual machines on our local computer or server! For those of you who don’t know what a Virtual Machine is, it’s a “computer” inside your computer.