Web Application Pentesting

Cross-site request forgery is one of those vulnerabilities that sounds simple until you actually try to exploit it in a modern application. In theory: trick a user’s browser into making an authenticated request to a target site. In practice: CSRF token validation, SameSite cookie policies, and Referer checks have made it significantly harder — but not impossible. In 2026, pure CSRF is less common on major platforms, but it still shows up regularly in internal tools, legacy enterprise apps, custom-built APIs, and any application that implements CSRF protection carelessly. And when CSRF tokens are present but misconfigured, the bypass is often trivially easy. ...

Cross-site scripting has been broken for as long as the web has existed. In 2026, it still shows up everywhere — modern SPAs, legacy enterprise apps, AI-generated frontends with no output encoding, CMS platforms with half-baked sanitization. XSS is the kind of vulnerability that’s “easy” to dismiss until you see a session token extracted from a banking app or a phishing payload delivered from a trusted domain. This guide covers everything: how XSS works, the three main categories, detection with Burp and manual techniques, exploitation for real impact, filter bypass when WAFs and sanitizers are in the way, and DOM-based XSS which most people still get wrong. ...

SQL injection has been on the OWASP Top 10 since the list started. In 2026, it still breaks real systems. Poorly sanitized inputs, legacy codebases, ORM misconfigurations — the attack surface hasn’t gone away. If anything, the rise of AI-generated code has introduced new classes of injection bugs. This guide covers everything: how SQLi works, how to detect it, how to exploit it across all major categories, how to weaponize SQLMap, and how to bypass WAFs when they’re in the way. ...

Web application pentesting is where most red teamers spend the majority of their billable hours. It’s also where a huge chunk of real-world breaches happen — not through exotic exploits, but through the same OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities that have existed for decades. This guide covers the full methodology: reconnaissance, mapping the attack surface, exploiting common vulnerabilities, and reporting findings. Whether you’re doing your first web pentest or sharpening your methodology for bug bounty, this is the process. ...