Running Head: Web Server Application Attacks
Web Server Application Attacks
Assignment # 1
Mariz Cebron
Common web application vulnerabilities and attacks, and recommend mitigation strategies The World Wide Web has evolved into a critical delivery pipeline for institutions to interact with customers, partners and employees. Via browsers, people use web sites to send and receive information via Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) messages to web applications housed on web servers. This information, expected as legitimate messages, can be used illegitimately in unauthorized ways to compromise security vulnerabilities a.) Authentication - one of the biggest
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These attacks usually put a heavy load on the target by making regular requests very rapidly. It is hard to distinguish if a web server is stormed by thousands of clients, or if there is a DoS attack in progress. A simple way to force the problem of heavy load is to use a server farm together with a load balancer. This will help against small attacks, but not against a DDoS started from several hundred hosts. Furthermore, increasing the number of servers is rather expensive.
Attack on the Justice Department’s Web site
An apparent denial of service attack, which overloads a site’s servers with requests for access, crippled portions of www.Justice.gov[->0]. Its site was experiencing “a significant increase in activity, resulting in degradation in service,” and officials said they would treat the situation “as a malicious act until we can fully identify the root cause of the disruption.” A loosely affiliated group of hackers known as Anonymous said the attack was in response to DOJ’s decision to shut down Megaupload.com[->1] on charges that the popular Web site illegally shared movies, television shows and e-books. Members of the Anonymous faction release the following video regarding the attack, along with a brief statement, neither of which details the motivation for this latest attack on the DoJ or the contents of the data the attack exposed. Anonymous members launched a
The messages sent out on Twitter by Payne on December 2, 2014, contained a link for a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on the SLCPA website. The distributed (DDoS) was an attempt to make a machine or network resource inaccessible to its intended users. Networks have a limited amount of connections at any given time. The defendant exploited this limit by initiating as many connections with SLCPA website,
With the intoduction of Web 2.0, sharing information through social networking has increased and as there has been increased business/services over the internet websites are often attacked directly. Hackers either attempt to compromise the network or alternetivly the end-users opening the website.
Confidentiality services is the first objective of the web services. It means the restrict access to sensitive information and data to any person except the persons or groups who have security clearance to see these data. It measure and prevent the unauthorized disclosure of
How do you secure something that is changing faster than you can fix it? The Internet has had security problems since its earliest days as a pure research project. Today, after several years and orders of magnitude of growth, is still has security problems. It is being used for a purpose for which it was never intended: commerce. It is somewhat ironic that the early Internet was design as a prototype for a high-availability command and control network that could resist outages resulting from enemy actions, yet it cannot resist college undergraduates. The problem is that the attackers are on, and make up apart of, the network they are attacking. Designing a system that is capable of resisting attack from within,
In this era of globalization and cut-throat world of competition, it is virtually impossible to do business without using the internet and web applications. Internet gets used for processing the credit card or debit card sale and even for using to save the data of customers to the merchant’s database for future reference and to send promotional offers to the previous and patron customers. And on the other hand, hackers are trying their best to get the data stored on the merchant’s server by spoofing
Alternative type of attack is called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. DDoS attacks are launched form numerous linked devices that are spread across the Internet. They are commonly harder to deflect, because of their sheer volume of devices involved. Unlike DoS attacks, DDoS assaults be apt to target the system infrastructure in an effort to drench it with huge volumes of traffic.
A majority of the software risks are associated with the poor programming practices, such as allowing changed in web page or SQL query structures; unrestricted upload of files; improper handling of operating system commands and log message content; unchecked Uniform Resource Locator (URL) redirection and race condition; inappropriate resource management; and weaker defenses including access control, authentication, encryption, and critical resource allocation porousness (Stallings & Brown, 2012). One of the most popular web application attacks is known as Cross Site Scripting (XSS), where the attacker maligns a vulnerable web page or server. When a user visits the compromised web page, the infected code executes in the browser using the web server privileges. XSS attacks can be of many forms, such as: reflected XSS, where the server directly processes the infected script; persistent XSS, where a stored infected script in the server is passed to the client’s browser and gets stored there; stealing of cookies; defacement of the web pages; phishing; execution of exploits; and violation of privacy (Chugh & Gupta,
Never once in the scene, is it explained what a DDos attack is or what it does that makes it so dangerous. For the average audience member, that lack of clarity can negatively effect the drama of the scene. Characters also talk about rootkits and backdoor access with no explanation of what they are. At one point they even mention something called a Raspberry Pi, a type of miniature computer, but to the average person this is far more likely to invoke images of an actual pie. The confusion caused by such instances can quickly lead to an audience which feels frustrated, or even
This scripting language is also increasingly being used as an attack mechanism by predators that exploit vulnerabilities within the client’s web browser; unpatched software or other JavaScript based applications for mounting their attack (Karanth et al, 2011). The assailant commonly obtains the information for identify theft and for personal financial gains (Wadlow, 2009).
Web applications are nowadays serving as a company’s public face to the internet. This has created the need to identify threats and attacks directed to data servers and web applications. Hackers exploit vulnerabilities in input validation and authentication affecting the web application in order to gain illegal access and disclose sensitive data or manipulate it to their benefits.
The internet is a medium that is becoming progressively important as it makes information available in a quick and easy manner. It has transformed communications and acts as a global network that allows people to communicate and interact without being limited by time, boarders and distance. However, the infrastructure is vulnerable to hackers who use the system to commit cyber crime. To accomplish this, they make use of innovative stealth techniques for their malicious purposes in the internet.
Denial-of-service is an attack aimed to refuse access for legitimate users and disrupt service availability according to www.msdn.microsoft.com. This type of security threat according to www.tech.co.uk is rapidly increasing on the Internet due to open doors on Websites. By using the Internet, companies increase the risk of denial of service attack. Denial of service can also be caused by too many connected to a server at the same making run slow or unavailable to others. People who deliberately abuse a network server are often difficult to track down.
In our network technology Server Hardening is one of the most important things to be handled on our servers, becomes more understandable when you realize all the risks involved. The default configuration of most operating systems are not designed with security as the primary focus. Now a days default setups are focus more on communications, usability and functionality. To protect our servers we must establish solid and sophisticated server hardening policies for all servers in our organization. Developing a server hardening checklist would likely be a great first step in increasing our server and network security. Make sure that our checklist includes minimum security practices that we expect of our staff.
Distributed denial of service is hard to block. Due to much traffic, system could not tolerate the unacceptable requests from different machines. A single user is attacked from the number of attackers. The millions of requests force the computer to shut down. The main purpose of denial of service is to disturb business of specific organization. The normal work is effected such as make server unavailable to its regular users. A single blockage of an IP address could not stop the attack.
In today’s highly connected digital ecosystem, our lives, businesses, communications, and a lot of activities depend on the websites and web applications. All websites contain sensitive data and deliver business-critical information services to the targeted audience. Due to the rapidly increasing use of websites and web applications, vulnerabilities have become quite rampant. Even the smallest security loophole can give cybercriminals a chance to destroy the web-based business, damage customer confidence, and brand reputation in a short time span.