Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing Guide

Exploit Databases
Inj3ctor exploit database is a very old and interesting exploit database. It was first called “milw0rm.
com”, then renamed to “inj3ctOr.com”, and is now known as “1337day.com.” The group is widely 
known and popular for hacking into 
Bhabha Atomic Research Centre
(
BARC
), the nuclear research 
facility in India. This database attracts our attention because you will find lots of private exploits 
here that cannot be found elsewhere, and it facilitates buying/selling of exploits, with the inj3ctor 
team acting as the middle man.
We, as penetration testers, can use it to our advantage by buying the private exploits and uti-
lizing them in our penetration tests. Sometimes, the “title of the vulnerability” and minor details 
that the author has described could give a great hint on where the vulnerability is located inside 
a particular application. For example, I was looking at a recent exploit which was up for sale. It 
was titled as “Paypal Stored XSS”. The author had included a small video which demonstrated the 
vulnerability. The vulnerability triggered as soon as the victim opened up the payment detail. This 
clearly gave an indication that the malicious payload was inserted inside the place which allowed 
us to send payments. On closely analyzing the page which allowed us to send payments, I noticed 
a field which allowed us to send a note to the person whom we would be sending a payment and 
that was the place which was used to trigger the vulnerability. Ofcourse, this could be complicated 
at times, however it’s always worth trying to save some money.
Another database that would be worth mentioning is exploit-db.com, which is maintained by 
the Offensive Security team. Exploit-db contains a list of more than 20,000 well-known exploits 
categorized by platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc.) and by the types of exploits (remote, 
local, shellcodes, DDOS, etc.).

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Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing Guide
Another advantage of using exploit-db is that it indicates if a particular exploit is verified or 
not. This way, you won’t end up running exploits that don’t work. Also, it would tell you if a 
Metasploit module is available for a particular exploit so you don’t have to do the tedious work 
of downloading, compiling, and debugging the exploit again.