What are Web Application Vulnerabilities?
Web application vulnerabilities involve a system flaw or weakness in a web-based application. They have been around for years; suffering from misconfigured web servers, and application design flaws, and they can be exploited to compromise the application’s security. Every element of your application can be affected by vulnerabilities inside of third-party code buried within the web application.
- Global Data breaches cost companies $3.92 million on average in 2021, and many of these incidents could have gotten prevented with the right strategy and investment into cybersecurity.
What is the federal government’s role in cybersecurity and web security?
“The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) leads the national effort to understand, manage, and reduce risk to our cyber and physical infrastructure. We connect our stakeholders in industry and government to each other and to resources, analyses, and tools to help them build their own cyber, communications, and physical security and resilience, helping to ensure a secure and resilient infrastructure for the American people. Our 2020 Year in Review displays key examples of CISA’s work to carry out its mission in 2020, including milestones and accomplishments as the Agency advanced strategic priorities to maintain a secure and resilient infrastructure for the nation.”
Understanding what is the real “risk”
To really understand your risks, learn more about some types of web application and cybersecurity attacks, view the OWASP top 10 web application vulnerability report.
List of Vulnerabilities according the OWASP Top 10 2021
- Allowing Domains or Accounts to expire while services are still active. (failure to renew company domains allow for hackers to assume these DNS names.)
- Buffer Overflow.
- Business logic vulnerability.
- CRLF Injection.
- CSV Injection by Timo Roosen, Albino wax.
- Catch NullPointerException.
- Covert storage channel.
- Deserialization of untrusted data.
- Default passwords
Components with known vulnerabilities
Every web application relies on other components to work. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) list includes all known security vulnerabilities. There are several layers of security vulnerability within the web application platform. These vulnerabilities include:
- Network Vulnerabilities. Examples include insecure Wi-Fi access points and poorly configured firewalls.
- Operating System Vulnerabilities. These are vulnerabilities within a particular operating system that hackers may exploit to gain access to an asset the OS is installed.
- Humans being humans. The weakest link in many cybersecurity architectures is the human element.
- Process Vulnerabilities. Flawed process controls can create some vulnerabilities. One example would be the use of weak passwords (which may also fall under human vulnerabilities).
Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities
Leveraging the National Vulnerability Database has a comprehensive list of known third-party vulnerabilities to help make the best choice in deploying code libraries.
Injection flaws are when an attacker uses exposed data to attack databases or directories apps. Two common injection attacks often get used. SQL injection and LDAP injection.
Affected objects: Injection attacks use input fields that interact with directories and databases to execute against vulnerabilities. These include usernames, passwords, and other areas that interact with the target. These fields are often left vulnerable because of the lack of an input filter when the database or directory’s development.
How to prevent injection flaws: There are ways we can help to prevent injection attacks. With SQL databases, create scripted SQL statements to prevent attackers from altering queries.
Security Self-Assessment – Running a vulnerability scanner continuously
Running vulnerability scanners prior to engaging the third-party pen testers will help provide the initial context of the current challenges prior to the white-box or gray-box teams performing their various attacks. While continuous scanning is effective at identifying security issues with the various web applications, the systems are also susceptible to false positives.
Moving pen testing from a tactical to a strategic work flow.
When considering the whole point of pen testing; the 3rd party pen teams focus on three fundamental challenges and weaknesses within any system:
- People
- Process
- Technology
People are human and they will continue to make mistakes. Users will click on the wrong email link, share their passwords, and forget to log out of their remote systems. Processes fail because the users forget to patch a system, update a password file, or most times backup their data to unsecure systems. Technology by itself is also an enormous risk to an organization. Deploying too much technology without having properly trained personnel along with not staying up on the vendor best practices or hoping the migration to the cloud will make the client’s system more secure, all lead to increased attack surfaces. Pen testing as a strategy work steam identified focuses on these areas and helps to determine the level of risk to the organization over a period.
Pen testing helps close the window of vulnerability that every system has.
