Exploits

Attackers utilize exploits to gain unauthorized access to an information system. An exploit takes advantage of vulnerabilities in an information system by implementing custom software, operating system commands, and open source tools.

The most pervasive and destructive web application vulnerabilities are cataloged and well defined by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). This organization has maintained a top 10 list for many years where they provide the tools to understand web application exploits and provide the information necessary for the developer to fix these issues in their applications. The OWASP website should be visited as it contains a wealth of information that can be used to enhance the security of your information and application security programs.

For more information on OWASP, please refer to https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Top_Ten_Project.

The OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities for 2017 are as follows:

• Injection: Injection flaws, such as SQL, OS, XXE, and LDAP injection occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker's hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization.
• Broken authentication and session management: Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users' identities (temporarily or permanently).
• Cross-site scripting (XSS): XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim's browser that can hijack user sessions, deface websites, or redirect the user to malicious sites.
• Broken access control: Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access other users' accounts, view sensitive files, modify other users' data, change access rights, and so on.
• Security misconfiguration: Good security requires having a secure configuration defined and deployed for the application, frameworks, application server, web server, database server, platform, and so on. Secure settings should be defined, implemented, and maintained, as defaults are often insecure. Additionally, software should be kept up to date.
• Sensitive data exposure: Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Sensitive data deserves extra protection such as encryption at rest or in transit, as well as special precautions when exchanged with the browser.
• Insufficient attack protection: The majority of applications and APIs lack the basic ability to detect, prevent, and respond to both manual and automated attacks. Attack protection goes far beyond basic input validation and involves automatically detecting, logging, responding, and even blocking exploit attempts. Application owners also need to be able to deploy patches quickly to protect against attacks.
• Cross-Site Request Forgery: A CSRF attack forces a logged-on victim's browser to send a forged HTTP request, including the victim's session cookie and any other automatically included authentication information, to a vulnerable web application. Such an attack allows the attacker to force a victim's browser to generate requests the vulnerable application thinks are legitimate requests from the victim.
• Using components with known vulnerabilities: Components such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts.
• Unprotected APIs: Modern applications often involve rich client applications and APIs, such as JavaScript in the browser and mobile apps, that connect to an API of some kind (SOAP/XML, REST/JSON, RPC, GWT, and so on). These APIs are often unprotected and contain numerous vulnerabilities.