Starting Burp labs
Posted on May 3, 2020
This week, as I am back to work, I started doing something I should've done a long time ago, and that is work through the Burp labs. I have mainly focused on the CORS and CSRF issues as I felt those were issues that I've encountered frequently but wasn't really mastering. I made decent progress in a week:
The experience has been eye opening, with a few "OOOOOH" moments when something finally clicked. I have read the Web Application Hacker's Handbook (WAHH) and I often keep a copy of it open when I'm doing a pentest to check up on the methodology, but without real, concrete examples where to apply that knowledge, some things didn't stick as much as others. DVWA and bWAPP help a lot, but they are a bit old and outdated (still great though!). Well, the current Burp labs are everything I could've dreamed about and more. Just in the CORS labs alone I've encountered situations that I've seen in my real pentests and fluidity of the labs is great. I think this, coupled with websites like HackTheBox, are going to help a whole new generation be way better equipped to deal with what an infosec job entails than ever before.
You just have to be willing to put in the work.
I have been debating whether to create a repo of my solutions for the Burp labs. On one hand, it's rather pointless since the solution is often in the lab description or just one click away, but on the other hand it should help is committing the results to memory. I think I'll start adding the solutions from now on.