(Newswire.net — August 17, 2016) — If your application was a bird, what would it be? An eagle soaring above the competition and proactively avoiding threats, or an ostrich with its head buried in the sand and oblivious to any potential attacks? When it comes to security, most applications are akin to the ostrich. Despite application security impacting an organization’s brand perception and even its bottom line, many businesses do not test their applications for security, instead relying on basic internal checks and only resolving vulnerabilities if they become a problem.
This reactive approach can have a disastrous effect when a vulnerability in your application is exploited by a malicious third party. Repercussions such as reputational damage, data breaches, loss of customer confidence, excessive downtime and potentially expensive remediation and legal costs could permanently clip your organization’s wings.
Despite such catastrophic consequences, application security is often not at the forefront of many organizations’ minds. According to application security solution provider Checkmarx, organizations should shift their focus from securing network parameters to protecting the application level. It identified five of the most common and serious application security threats your business must watch out for:
1. SQL Injection
Injection attacks occur when malicious code is inserted into an entry field for execution. As the most common form of injection attacks, SQL injection occurs when a user input field allows SQL statements to query the database directly. Simply put, an SQL injection can destroy your database.
Your database becomes incredibly vulnerable to attackers, who can effectively take over the administrative rights of the server to tamper with existing data, void transactions, change account balances, disclose all of your company’s sensitive data, destroy this data or make it otherwise unavailable, for example.
2. Cross-Site Scripting
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is another form of injection attack, where malicious scripts (also commonly referred to as a malicious payload) are executed into your web application. If your web app accepts inputs, you must ensure that it properly separates the data from the executable code before an input is returned to the user’s browser, otherwise your website could deliver a malicious script to the victim’s browser.
Although VBScript, ActiveX and Flash are prone to XSS attacks, JavaScript is the most widely abused syntax as it is fundamental to most browsing experiences. The consequences of such attacks are not immediately obvious but include:
- Access to session cookies, allowing an attacker to impersonate that user.
- Modifications to the browser’s DOM.
- Using the XMLHttpRequest JavaScript snippet to send HTTP requests with arbitrary content to arbitrary destinations.
- Leveraging HTML5 APIs to access a user’s microphone, webcam, geolocation or even some files.
A combination of the above consequences allows attackers to pull off a range of advanced attacks from keylogging, phishing, cookie theft and identity theft.
3. Cross-Site Request Forgery
A Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attack essentially tricks a victim into accessing a website that contains malicious or unauthorized requests. The attack uses the identity and privileges of the victim to impersonate them and carry out actions such as changing form submission details or carrying out purchases for the attacker. It’s a different premise to the XSS attacks mentioned above. For XSS, the attacker exploits the trust a user has for a website but, for CSRF, the attacker exploits the trust a website has against a user’s browser.
The result is the same for both attacks. A user’s identity and information is compromised and your customer confidence is crippled.
4. Session Hijacking and Broken Authentication
Improper implementation of authentication and session management functions let attackers assume user identities and perform any action that the user could perform. This compromises your customers’ accounts and leaves attackers free to add, alter or remove their data or place orders, for example.
5. Parameter Manipulation
Parameters often pass information from one web page to another on a website but an attacker could exploit these parameters to gain access to your users’ sensitive data or leak your sensitive corporate information. Parameter manipulation is a simple yet highly effective attack, which is often done by tampering with cookies, form fields, URL Query Strings and HTTP Headers, for example.
How to Prevent Such Application Attacks?
White-box testing can eliminate such vulnerabilities and identify your application’s flaws. Static Application Security Testing (SAST) is one such white-box solution that examines your application’s blueprint without executing any code. It creates a model of how the application interacts with users and other data to quickly identify critical vulnerabilities with the help of a little automation.
Source Code Analysis (SCA) is another essential weapon in your application security arsenal. Uncompiled code is scanned, enabling developers and auditors to compile and investigate feedback on their code to improve both its quality and security. The combination of SAST and SCA is essentially your application’s safety net to identify and resolve any issues and vulnerabilities before your software hits production, which helps your organization to protect against such application attacks before they hit.
There are many proactive methods to improve the security of your organization’s applications. Whatever route you chose, protecting against cybercrime at the application layer is vital to ensure your organization flies high and is not shot down by a dangerous attack.