Pentesting

Business logic vulnerabilities are the ones that slip through scanners completely. No CVE, no exploit-db entry, no Nuclei template. Just a gap between what the application intends to do and what it actually does when you push it sideways. They’re also some of the most valuable findings you can report. High business impact, hard to auto-detect, and often sitting in production for years because nobody thought to test them. This guide covers how to find them, how to exploit them, and what real business logic attacks look like in practice. ...

Insecure deserialization has handed attackers RCE in some of the most hardened enterprise environments on the planet — Apache, Jenkins, JBoss, WebLogic, Oracle, and more. A single malformed object can bypass authentication, execute arbitrary code, or delete your entire database. This guide covers detection, exploitation, gadget chains, and WAF bypass for Java, PHP, Python, and .NET in 2026. What Is Deserialization? Serialization converts an object in memory into a format that can be stored or transmitted — bytes, JSON, XML, binary. Deserialization reverses it: takes the stored format and reconstructs the object. ...

Server-Side Template Injection (SSTI) is one of the most dangerous web vulnerabilities you’ll encounter. A simple {{7*7}} in the right field can hand you full remote code execution on a production server. This guide covers everything — detection, fingerprinting, exploitation, WAF bypass, and defense — for every major template engine in 2026. What Is SSTI? Web frameworks use template engines to render dynamic content — think Flask with Jinja2, PHP apps with Twig, Java apps with FreeMarker. When user input is concatenated directly into a template string rather than passed as a variable, the template engine evaluates it. That’s SSTI. ...

File inclusion vulnerabilities are deceptively simple on the surface — you trick an application into loading a file it shouldn’t. But the exploitation paths they open up range from sensitive data disclosure all the way to full remote code execution. Log poisoning, PHP filter chains, session file injection, null byte tricks — this vulnerability class has more depth than most. If you’re doing web app pentesting or bug bounty hunting in 2026, you’ll encounter file inclusion regularly. PHP applications are the most common target, but the patterns appear in other languages too. This guide covers LFI and RFI from first principles through advanced exploitation. ...

Command injection is one of the most dangerous vulnerability classes in web security. Not because it’s subtle — it’s actually one of the most direct paths to full system compromise. You inject a shell command through a web input, the server executes it, and suddenly you’re running arbitrary code on someone’s infrastructure. OWASP has kept injection in its Top 10 for over a decade for good reason. When you find command injection, the game changes. It’s not “I can read a record I shouldn’t.” It’s “I own this server.” ...

Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) is consistently one of the highest-impact vulnerabilities in web applications and APIs — and it’s one of the easiest to miss during a standard pentest if you don’t know where to look. It doesn’t require complex payloads. No memory corruption. No custom shellcode. You find an ID, swap it for another ID, and suddenly you’re reading someone else’s data. Or deleting it. Or taking over their account. ...

Once you have credentials or a shell on one host, the real game begins: moving through the network without getting caught. Lateral movement in Active Directory is where most engagements are won or lost. This is the full playbook. Every technique. The tools, the commands, the detection notes, and the OPSEC considerations that separate a successful engagement from a blocked one. What Is Lateral Movement in AD? Lateral movement is the process of using access on one system to gain access to others. In an Active Directory environment, this is especially powerful because credentials, tickets, and tokens are often reusable across the domain. ...

CrackMapExec is dead. Long live NetExec. If you’ve been in offensive security for more than a few years, CrackMapExec (CME) was probably one of the first tools you learned. It became the go-to for Active Directory enumeration, credential testing, and lateral movement — packed into a single framework with clean output and a protocol-agnostic design. In 2023, the original author archived the project. The community forked it and kept building under a new name: NetExec (nxc). Same DNA, actively maintained, and compatible with everything CME could do. ...

Google Cloud is no longer just AWS’s little sibling. It’s the backbone of YouTube, Google Workspace, and thousands of Fortune 500 environments. In 2026, GCP powers a significant chunk of enterprise infrastructure — and most red teams still don’t know how to attack it properly. This guide fixes that. We’ll walk through a complete GCP attack chain: from passive recon through persistence, using real commands against real services. If you’ve done our AWS pentesting guide or Azure pentesting guide , this follows the same structure — but GCP has its own quirks that’ll trip you up if you treat it like AWS. ...

Introduction Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) has been at the center of some of the most damaging data breaches in cloud history. From exposed customer databases to leaked government documents, misconfigured S3 buckets remain a goldmine for attackers — and a nightmare for defenders. In 2026, S3 misconfigurations haven’t disappeared. They’ve evolved. New attack surfaces emerge from complex IAM chains, cross-account trust relationships, and the growing use of S3 as a backend for serverless and containerized workloads. For red teamers and pentesters, S3 is still one of the highest-value targets in any AWS engagement. ...