Lab: Path Traversal

 

This was a basic lab demonstrating the security flaw present in some websites, exploiting which the attacker is able to traverse the file system of the hosting server.

I start the lab by accessing the website:

There were no obvious discrepancies with the website so I refresh the page but this time I am intercepting my requests in burpsuite.

I previously learned in the section how the website's `GET` requests can be manipulated, and in my intercepted request the website was trying to get the images for the products.

I knew from my linux courses that in linux servers the html resources or the webserver root directory is generally in `/var/www/`.

And from the request we are in `images` folder within the website root, so all I needed to do was backtrack to `/` and from there navigate to `/etc/passwd`:

And as you can see, this gave me the `/etc/passwd` file I was looking for.