Web App Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking

Web applications play a vital role in every modern organization. But, if your organization does not properly test and secure its web apps, adversaries can compromise these applications, damage business functionality, and steal data. Unfortunately, many organizations operate under the mistaken impression that a web application security scanner will reliably discover flaws in their systems.

SEC542 helps students move beyond push-button scanning to professional, thorough, high-value web application penetration testing.

Customers expect web applications to provide significant functionality and data access. Even beyond the importance of customer-facing web applications, internal web applications increasingly represent the most commonly used business tools within any organization. Unfortunately, there is no "patch Tuesday" for custom web applications, so major industry studies find that web application flaws play a major role in significant breaches and intrusions. Adversaries increasingly focus on these high-value targets either by directly abusing public-facing applications or by focusing on web apps as targets after an initial break-in.

Modern cyber defense requires a realistic and thorough understanding of web application security issues. Anyone can learn to sling a few web hacks, but effective web application penetration testing requires something deeper.

SEC542 enables students to assess a web application's security posture and convincingly demonstrate the impact of inadequate security that plagues most organizations.

Students will come to understand major web application flaws and their exploitation and, most importantly, learn a field-tested and repeatable process to consistently find these flaws and convey what they have learned to their organizations. Even technically gifted security geeks often struggle with helping organizations understand risk in terms relatable to business. Much of the art of penetration testing has less to do with learning how adversaries are breaking in than it does with convincing an organization to take the risk seriously and employ appropriate countermeasures. The goal of SEC542 is to better secure organizations through penetration testing, and not just show off hacking skills. The course will help you demonstrate the true impact of web application flaws through exploitation.

In addition to high-quality course content, SEC542 focuses heavily on in-depth, hands-on labs to ensure that students can immediately apply all they learn.

In addition to more than 30 formal hands-on labs, the course culminates in a web application pen test tournament, powered by the SANS NetWars Cyber Range. This Capture the Flag event on the final day brings students into teams to apply their newly acquired command of web application penetration testing techniques in a fun way to hammer home lessons learned.