Xaliom's Blog

Portswigger Practice Exam #1 In this blogpost we will see how to complete The Burp Suite Pratice Exam by Portswigger We have 2 hours to complete the exam. The Exam itself is made up of three steps, in each of which we have to exploit a different vulnerability. Steps: DOM Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) SQL Injection Insecure Desearilization Step #0: Starting the exam At the bottom of this page , we can start either the first or the second exam. Let's start the first one by clicking on the first orange button. Let's click on the next button to confirm to start the practice exam. Now let's wait a few minutes to let the lab load up. Step #1: DOM Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)Finally, let's click on the App 1 Button to load the exam webpage. Let's enable the DOM Invader Extension Let's use the Dom invader to identify the Sink(s) Let's validate that we can exploit this sink with the following payload "-alert()-" to achieve a DOM XSS Let's try to read the co...

 Certified Azure Red Team Professional (CARTP) Course & Exam Review In this blogpost, I will write down my thoughts about both the course and the exam to obtain the Certified Azure Red Team Professional (CARTP) certification. Even though I don't usually write about the certification I obtain, this time I will make an exception to thank Nikhil Mittal. The Course Material The Course material provided by the Altered Security team consists of: The Course Videos The Course Videos are the Main resource if you take the self-paced version of the course. Those videos will cover both the theory and the Learning objectives that you can see as the practical section of the course.  The Walkthrough Videos The Walkthrough videos, a resource that I did not use. But I see why they exist and how a learner can rely on them to review his steps to understand what he is doing wrong. The Lab Manual In short, this is a well-written PDF where a learner can find the command used to solve the Learni...

 From SAST to CVE-2025-46337 From the start of my career in cybersecurity, I have always worked as a black box pentester. Since I believe that learning new topics is always a good use of my time and that I should increase my knowledge of white box pen testing, I decided to explore the Static Analysis Security Testing (SAST) topic. I started my journey into SAST using the well-known tool SonarQube. To practice with the tool and to become familiar with the GUI and the mechanisms that are behind it, I decided to analyze the code of a few known projects. I chose two projects to analyze. The first one is "Moodle", a very well-known open-source project whose main purpose is to create websites for universities. The second is VtigerCRM, a familiar project on which I discovered several CVEs last summer. I started the SAST first against the source code of Moodle and then against the source code of VtigerCRM. Surprisingly, SonarQube found an SQL Injection on both projects! Since the sou...

 Setting Up SonarQube on a Unix VM Prerequisite: A Unix VM with at least 4GB of RAM (8GB recommended)( link ) Shopping List: SonarQube Web Server "Community Edition" ( link ) SonarQube Scanner ( link ) Abstract: In this blog post, we will go through the steps to set up a SonarQube instance to analyze the source code of an application on an Ubuntu VM. If you're unfamiliar with SonarQube, it is an excellent open-source SAST tool designed to integrate with various CI/CD platforms. Once we have a fully functional Ubuntu VM with at least 4GB of RAM (I recommend using 8GB if possible), we need to set up both the SonarQube web server and the SonarQube scanner. Installing the SonarQube Web Server: Let's download the SonarQube Web Server by visiting the link showed above and clicking on the highlighted button: https://www.sonarsource.com/products/sonarqube/downloads/                  Let's close the pop-up to start the download clicking on the ...