This article was written to provide readers with an overview of a selection of our pentest results from the last 15 months. This data was gathered toward the end of September 2025. Shockingly, the data does not differ much from our prior analyses conducted at the end of 2022 or 2023.

The post Why You Got Hacked – 2025 Super Edition appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Imagine this: You’re an attacker ready to get their hands on valuable data that you can sell to afford going on a sweet vacation. You do your research, your recon, everything, ensuring that there’s no way this can go wrong. The day of the attack, you brew some coffee, crack your knuckles, and get started. A few hours into the service scan, you come to realize that all the network ports are open, but in use.

The post GoSpoof – Turning Attacks into Intel  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Whether it's forgotten temporary files, installation artifacts, READMEs, or even simple image files--default content on web servers can turn into a boon for attackers. In the most innocent of cases, these types of content can let attackers know more about the tech stack of the environment, and in the worst case scenario can lead to exploitation.

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A Content Security Policy (CSP) is a security mechanism implemented by web servers and enforced by browsers to prevent various types of attacks, primarily cross-site scripting (XSS). CSP works by restricting resources (scripts, stylesheets, images, etc.) on a webpage to only execute if they come from approved sources. However, like most things in security, CSP isn't bulletproof.

The post Bypassing CSP with JSONP: Introducing JSONPeek and CSP B Gone appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Dirsearch is an open-source multi-threaded “web path discovery” tool first released in 2014. The program, written in Python, is similar to other tools such as Dirbuster or Gobuster, and aims to quickly find hidden content on web sites.

The post How to Use Dirsearch appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Go-Spoof brings an old tool to a new language. The Golang rewrite [of Portspoof] provides similar efficiency and all the same features of the previous tool but with easier setup and useability.

The post Go-Spoof: A Tool for Cyber Deception appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

I’ve been a web application pentester for a while now and over the years must have found hundreds of cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities.1 Cross-site scripting is a notoriously difficult problem […]

The post Canary in the Code: Alert()-ing on XSS Exploits appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

If you’ve ever had to take a request from Burp and turn it into a command line, especially for jwt_tool.py, you know it can be painful—but no more! The “Copy For” extension is here to save valuable time. 

The post Burp Suite Extension: Copy For  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

In this video, Dave Blandford discusses a beginner's guide to creating Burp Suite extensions. The session covers an overview of what Burp extensions are, how they can improve testing capabilities, and the tools and languages used in developing them.

The post Creating Burp Extensions: A Beginner’s Guide appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

In the most recent revision of the OWASP Top 10, Broken Access Controls leapt from fifth to first.1 OWASP describes an access control as something that “enforces policy such that […]

The post Finding Access Control Vulnerabilities with Autorize appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Recently, as part of our ANTISOC Continuous Penetration Testing (CPT) service, I had an opportunity to investigate how attackers can leverage Slack in cyber-attacks, similar to how we frequently use […]

The post Introducing SlackEnum: A User Enumeration Tool for Slack appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

The WebSocket Protocol, standardized in 2011 with RFC 6455, enables full-duplex communication between clients and web servers over a single, persistent connection, resolving a longstanding limitation of HTTP that hindered […]

The post Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop Hijacking (CSWSH) WebSockets  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

The new year has begun, and as a penetration tester at Black Hills Information Security, one thing really struck me as I reflected on 2023: a concerningly large number of […]

The post Revisiting Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Pentest reports sometimes include bad information under a heading like, “Weak TLS Configuration” or “Insecure SSL Certificates.” This article will explain how TLS is supposed to work, common ways it […]

The post Testing TLS and Certificates  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

If you’ve been on a website and noticed one of the following features, there’s a good chance you’ve stumbled upon a hot spot for server-side request forgery (SSRF) bugs:  Before […]

The post Hunting for SSRF Bugs in PDF Generators  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Isaac Burton // For as long as we have known about prototype pollution vulnerabilities, there has been confusion on what they are and how they can be exploited. We’re going […]

The post Hit the Ground Running with Prototype Pollution   appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Alyssa Snow // During an external or internal network penetration test, it can be challenging to comb through each web server in scope to find the juicy stuff. During a […]

The post Gowitness, a Tester’s Time Saver appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Have you ever been on a pentest and thought to yourself, “I wish I had a robot to do this testing for me right now cuz this is just too much work”?

The post How to Build a Pentest Robot With Selenium IDE appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Daniel Pizarro // What is the PNPT?  The Practical Network Penetration Tester (PNPT), created by TCM Security (TCMS), is a 5-day ethical hacking certification exam that assesses a pentester’s ability […]

The post PNPT: Certification Review appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Joff Thyer // Introduction We have already arrived at the end of 2022; wow, that was fast. As with any industry or aspect of life, we find ourselves peering into […]

The post <strong>Forward into 2023: Browser and O/S Security Features</strong>  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..