Burp Suite Essentials

Burp Suite is the core tool for every web application assessment. It sits between your browser and the target as an intercepting proxy, letting you inspect, modify, and replay every request. On the OSWA exam, Burp Community Edition is permitted and is where most of your manual testing happens: reading traffic, tampering with parameters, replaying requests in Repeater, and fuzzing with Intruder. Mastering Burp is a prerequisite for every vulnerability class that follows.

Proxy, Repeater, and Intruder

The proxy captures and lets you intercept live traffic between browser and server. HTTP history keeps a full record of every request for later review. Repeater is where you hand-craft and resend individual requests to test payloads and observe responses one at a time. Intruder automates payload injection across marked positions for fuzzing, enumeration, and controlled brute forcing. Decoder and Comparer support encoding tasks and response diffing when a change is subtle.