How to Attack and Defend Your Website is a concise introduction to web security that includes hands-on web hacking tutorials. The book has three primary objectives: to help readers develop a deep understanding of what is happening behind the scenes in a web application, with a focus on the HTTP protocol and other underlying web technologies; to teach readers how to use the industry standard in free web application vulnerability discovery and exploitation tools – most notably Burp Suite, a fully featured web application testing tool; and finally, to gain knowledge of finding and exploiting the most common web security vulnerabilities.

This book is for information security professionals and those looking to learn general penetration testing methodology and how to use the various phases of penetration testing to identify and exploit common web protocols.

How to Attack and Defend Your Website is be the first book to combine the methodology behind using penetration testing tools such as Burp Suite and Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA), with practical exercises that show readers how to (and therefore, how to prevent) pwning with SQLMap and using stored XSS to deface web pages.