Summary

In this chapter, we learned about the importance of a web server signature, and that obtaining the server signature is the first step in hacking.

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."

– Abraham Lincoln

The same thing applies in our case. Before the start of an attack on a web server, it is better to check exactly which services are running on it. This is done by foot printing the web server. Error-handling techniques are a passive process. Header checking and banner grabbing are active processes to gather information about the web server. In this chapter, we have also learned about the BeautifulSoup parser. Sections such as hyperlinks, tags, and IDs can be obtained from BeautifulSoup. In the last section, we covered some guidelines for hardening a web server. If you follow those guidelines, you can make your web server difficult to attack.

In the next chapter, you will learn about client-side validation and parameter tampering. You...