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Cybersecurity Blog

Thought leadership. Threat analysis. Cybersecurity news and alerts.

1/27/2019

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3 Most Common Web Application Security Vulnerabilities

 
Common Web Application Security Vulnerabilities

3 Most Common Web Application Security Vulnerabilities

Almost all organizations today have an online presence, mostly in the form of an official website. While these websites open a window of opportunities for organizations, these same websites are at times a bane to organizations as these are becoming attractive targets for cyber attackers.

What Are Web Application Security Vulnerabilities?

One of the ways by which cyber attackers wreak havoc on corporate websites is by exploiting the security vulnerabilities in web applications.

Web applications, also known as web apps, refer to software programs that run in a web browser. A web application can be as simple as a contact form on a website or a content management system like WordPress. Web application security vulnerabilities, meanwhile, refers to system flaw or security weakness in a web application.

Web applications are gateways to a trove of data that cyber attackers find attractive and easy to steal. Every time website visitors sign up for an account, enter their credentials or make a purchase via an official corporate website, all this data, including personally identifiable information, is stored on a server that sits behind that web application. Exploiting a security vulnerability in a web application allows attackers to access the data stored on that server.

Imperva, in its “State of Web Application Vulnerabilities in 2018”, reported that the overall number of new web application vulnerabilities in 2018 increased by 23%, that is, 17,308 web application vulnerabilities, compared to 2017 with only 14,082 web application vulnerabilities.

Most Common Web Application Security Vulnerabilities

Here are the 3 most common security vulnerabilities affecting web applications:

1. Injections

Based on Imperva’s data, the number one web application vulnerability in 2018 was injection, representing 19% of the web application vulnerabilities last year. In an injection attack, an attacker inserts or injects code into the original code of a web application, which alters the course of execution of the web app.

According to Imperva, the preferred method of attackers last year to inject code into web applications was remote command execution (RCE) with 1,980 vulnerabilities.

Remote command execution allows an attacker to remotely take over the server that sits behind a web application by injecting an arbitrary malicious code on the web app. The Equifax data breach that exposed highly sensitive data of millions of U.S. customers, as well as thousands of U.K. and Canadian consumers, is an example of a cyberattack that used the injection method, in particular, remote command execution.

Attackers gained access to the data of millions of Equifax’ customers by exploiting the vulnerability designated as CVE-2017-5638in the web application used by the company. At the time of the attack, Equifax then used an outdated Apache Struts, a popular open source framework for creating enterprise-grade web applications.

Despite the advisory from the Apache Software Foundation, the organization that oversees leading open source projects, including Apache Struts, to update the software to the latest version, Equifax failed to do so, leading the attackers to breach the sensitive data of millions of the company’s customers.

On March 7, 2017, the Apache Software Foundation issued a patch or security update for CVE-2017-5638 vulnerability. On May 13, 2017, just a few days after the CVE-2017-5638 patch was released, attackers started their 76-day long cyberattack on Equifax, this according to the findings of the U.S. House Oversight Committee.

2. Cross-Site Scripting

The second most common web application vulnerability is cross-site scripting. According to Imperva, cross-site scripting ranked as the second most common vulnerability in 2018, representing 14% of the web application vulnerabilities last year. 

Cross-site scripting, also known as XSS, is a type of injection in which malicious code is inserted into a vulnerable web application. Unlike injection in general, cross-site scripting particularly targets web visitors.

In a cross-site scripting attack scenario, an attacker, for instance, embeds an HTML tag in an e-commerce website’s comments section, making the embedded tag a permanent fixture of a webpage, causing the browser to read the embedded tag together with the rest of the original code every time the page is opened, regardless of the fact that some site visitors don’t scroll down to the comments section.

The injected HTML tag in the comments section could activate a file, which is hosted on another site, allowing the attacker to steal visitors’ session cookies – information that web visitors have inputted into the site. With the stolen session cookies of site visitors, attackers could gain access to the visitors’ personal information and credit card data.

3. Vulnerabilities in Content Management Systems

Imperva’s State of Web Application Vulnerabilities in 2018 also showed attackers are focusing their attention to vulnerabilities in content management systems, in particular, WordPress.

Attackers are focusing their attention on WordPress as this content management system powers nearly one-third of the world’s website. Data from W3Techsshowed that as of late December, last year, WordPress usage account for 32.9% of the world’s websites, followed by Joomla and Drupal.

According to Imperva, the number of WordPress vulnerabilities increased in 2018 despite the slowed growth in new plugins. Imperva registered 542 WordPress vulnerabilities in 2018, the highest among the content management systems. The WordPressofficial website, meanwhile, reported that only 1,914 or 3% from the total 55,271 plugins were added in 2018.

Ninety-eight percent of WordPress vulnerabilities are related to plugins, Imperva reported. Plugins expand the features and functionalities of a website. WordPress plugins are, however, prone to vulnerabilities as with this content management system (being an open source software), anyone can create a plugin and publish it without security auditing to ensure that the plugins adhere to minimum security standards.

Web Application Attack Prevention

A web application firewall (WAF) is one of the best cybersecurity solutions that your organization can employ against web application vulnerabilities.

Trust the experienced team that protects hundreds of sites and applications. Protect your web application within 10-minutes and keep cybercriminals at bay. Get started today!

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2/4/2017

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Bot Traffic Report 2016

 

Bot traffic report infographics

The following Infographics was published by our partner Imperva Incapsula. Interesting trends concerning the bot traffic and its evolution.
Bot traffic report infographics
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12/12/2016

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7 Myths About Web Application Firewalls 

 
Web Application Firewall
Web Application Firewalls (WAF) have become essential to defend businesses, of all sizes, from sophisticated application layer attacks. Why is WAF so important? Because of the many points of integration within the internal and external system, web application is often seen as a gateway to mission critical information. When web application defence is weak, it makes it easy for an attacker to compromise the web application, gaining access to personal information and intellectual property. Protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks (which is frequently covered by the mainstream media), is one of the key functionalities of the web application firewalls.
According to the Imperva’s Bot Traffic Report, nearly half of all website visitors are bots. 29% are bad bots including impersonators, hackers, thieves and spammers. An alarming 90% of security events are cause by bad bots, making web application defence even more essential for businesses.
​
  1. We don’t need it because we already have perimeter firewalls - while perimeter firewalls are an important component of your defence against intruders, for the most part, perimeter firewalls are designed to protect the infrastructure layer, i.e. to make sure that your personal computers, file servers, and other network devices are not exposed and could not be easily accesses by cyber criminals. Web Application Firewalls are designed specifically to protect website and web applications without negatively affecting user experience.
  2. It will slow down our website or web application - while it might be the case for some providers, leading WAF providers, utilize what’s called a Content Delivery Network (CDN), that generally makes your web applications run faster by temporarily caching some of the web application resources.
  3. After it’s setup, I’m “chained” to the provider and can’t turn it off - because you are always in control of your own Domain Name Services (DNS) records and can also bypass it by simply disabling the WAF in settings, you will always remain in control and can make any changes if and when you need it.
  4. Attackers can still succeed attacking the origin IP directly - this is only true when you don’t restrict access to the WAF provider’s IP ranges, or in simple terms, allow access to the web application directly bypassing the firewall. With the proper implementation, access to the web application must always flow through the WAF provider without exceptions. Your webmaster will know how to make this simple change.
  5. It will take a lot of time and resources to implement WAF - implementing an on-premise solution can be cumbersome. However, when you use a SaaS solution, most web application firewall deployments take anywhere between one and three business days unless you have tens or hundreds of web applications, in which case it may take a bit longer.
  6. It’s too expensive to implement and manage WAF - contrary to the popular belief, it’s truly affordable for virtually any size business. Moreover, fully-managed WAF solutions will save you money since the idea behind it is to reduce the overall pressure on your IT support personnel, whether in-house or external. It will also protect your business against both reputational damage and legal liability due to potential loss of customer data.
  7. It keeps the application data in cache making us non-compliant - in many cases, and in order to speed up the process of safeguarding your data by blocking bad bots and DDoS attacks, the data in-flight is processed in memory and is not kept as physical media for prolonged periods of time. Generally, you will have full control over the caching methods and settings and will be able to ensure that no copies of data are stored elsewhere.​

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    Steve E. Driz, I.S.P., ITCP

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