The observed payload is: -page-....-2F-2F....-2F-2F....-2F-2Fetc-2Fpasswd
A path traversal attack occurs when an application uses unvalidated user input to build a file path on the server. Path Traversal - Web Security Academy - PortSwigger -page-....-2F-2F....-2F-2F....-2F-2Fetc-2Fpasswd
The obfuscated path "-page-....-2F-2F....-2F-2F....-2F-2Fetc-2Fpasswd" is indicative of such an attack. Here, "2F" represents the URL-encoded forward slash, suggesting that the attacker is trying to "dot dot" their way up the directory tree ( ../ ) to reach the root directory and then navigate to "/etc/passwd". The observed payload is: -page-
If a developer hasn't sanitized the input, an attacker can replace intro.html with the traversal payload. The server then processes a path like: /var/www/html/articles/../../../../etc/passwd HTML URL Encoding Reference - W3Schools "2F" represents the URL-encoded forward slash
