Defensive Security Intro

Muhammad Subhan — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 22:31:56 +0000

Now over hear instead of us being the attacker, we are the defender, an SOC analyst. We were given a monitoring system which detects suspicious attempts and reports them to us. It reported that FakeBank.com was accessed on the admin endpoint so I had to block the source of the traffic. Joe (the SOC analyst) added rate limiting. Rate limiting helps as it caps the amount of requests a user can send to the server. Dirb works by sending hundreds or thousands of requests per second. which means rate limiting throttles or blocks it. and Web Application Firewall (WAF). The firewall allowed me to block the traffics Ip so that source could not access the website again.

Offensive Security Intro

Muhammad Subhan — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:37:38 +0000

This is the starting of my journey. The first path I cross is TryHackMe. This is the first room from PreSecurity. Dirb, a tool that discovers hidden/unlinked pages on a website by rapidly guessing common folder and file names from a wordlist. A CODE:200 response means the page exists. Example: dirb https://example.com/ might reveal https://example.com/admin/, https://example.com/config.php, https://example.com/backup/, etc. In the room (a fake bank), this exposed an admin dashboard and a users.db file that were reachable by anyone with the URL. Why it's a vulnerability: those pages should have been behind a login or blocked — leaving them accessible lets an attacker reach sensitive data directly. Remediation: require authentication on admin areas, keep database/backup files out of web-accessible folders, return 403/404 for sensitive paths.

DEV Community: Muhammad Subhan

Defensive Security Intro

Offensive Security Intro