Today, I’ll guide you through the fascinating journey of penetration testing, the process used by cybersecurity professionals to identify and patch vulnerabilities before they become serious security risks.

For our purposes, let’s imagine our target is a fictional web application named “SuperDuperApp.”

We start by collecting as much data as we can about SuperDuperApp.

This can include looking up its domain registration data via WHOIS, exploring its past versions using the Wayback Machine, and even examining its website structure.

We find out that it runs on a Linux server, uses PHP for backend processing, and has a MySQL database.

Next, we run a tool like Nmap to scan SuperDuperApp’s IP address for open ports and active services.

It gives us a list of open ports, including port 80 for HTTP and port 22 for SSH.

Using enumeration, we learn more about these services. For instance, by inspecting HTTP headers, we discover that SuperDuperApp runs an old version of Apache.

With this information, we search for vulnerabilities related to the outdated Apache version using a vulnerability scanner like Nessus.

We find out that there is a known vulnerability (let’s call it CVE-2023–1234) which can potentially allow unauthorized access.

We use a tool like Metasploit to exploit the discovered vulnerability.

This vulnerability allows us to execute arbitrary commands on the server due to a flaw in the…