Why I'm doing this
- Learning it to help prevent and detect attacks in the web apps
What I set up
- Kali Linux in VirtualBox
- Burp Suite Community
- Firefox proxied through Burp
The moment it clicked
- I typed example.com, pressed Enter, and the page just... hung. Nothing loaded. For a second I thought I’d broken something. Then I switched to Burp and there it was: my browser’s request, in plain text, frozen mid-flight. I clicked Forward and the page finally appeared. I had just stopped a website request in the middle of the road and looked inside it.
One concept I had to understand: port
- 8080 is a port, like a door number in a building. We told Firefox to hand its requests to the program waiting at that door, which is Burp.
What confused me
Why HTTP/HTTPS looks the same: HTTPS is HTTP inside an encrypted TLS wrapper.
Why Burp over other tools: it lets you edit, replay and automate requests, and the PortSwigger labs are built around it.
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