Web application and data server threats
Web application and data server threats are on the rise; as a result, they are at the heart of every firm that stores sensitive financial information, client records, and even corporate data. Web apps are software that is used during an Internet browsing event, whereas data servers contain critical and even private information about a company.
Risks and vulnerabilities
Some risks are far-reaching and must not be neglected. SQL injection is the first. This form of attack grants the hacker unrestricted access to a whole database, resulting in a denial of service attack by producing confusion in detailed data such as blueprints and passwords. Malware majorly entails the hackers using advanced attacks that blend various tactics that surpass organizational information and extract sensitive data, also involves the penetration of viruses such as the Trojan horse within crucial information in an organization database.
Storage media exposure often unprotected from an attack; as a result, several security breaches are involved in the theft of backup disks and tapes.
Phishing majorly entails the attacker attempting to obtain valuable or confidential information such as the login credentials or account information (“Top five threats”, 2017).
Areas Which Are Vulnerable to Web Threats
Areas of vulnerability for potential data damage are. Cross-site scripting and injection majorly entail the SQL injection, operating system, and LDAP injection and they all work by sending malicious data to an application as a form of query or command. Cross-site scripting entails attack that target application users through injecting code into web applications output such as the Java scripts.
Security misconfiguration web application is made up of sophisticated devices and software, such as the servers, firewalls, databases, and OS application software. All these need to be securely maintained and configured. A mishap may lead to severe loss or manipulation of data ("Five common Web application vulnerabilities and how to avoid them", 2017).
Broken session management and authentication web applications manage user authentication and keep close survey of the user request as HTTP are incompetent in this area. This does not happen if they are all protected and encrypted at all times against attacker and flaws such as XSS.
Attack Scenario Where a Hacker Uses an Area of Vulnerability in an Organization
An attack situation is the case of SQL injection whereby the hacker has the intention to compromise the database of an organization by the acquisition of data and its structures. These could be the passwords and usernames (Singh, Joseph, & Singh, 2008). A good example is a situation where a hacker may create a shadow website which is similar to the organization’s one, thus obtaining the username and password from a worker who clicks on the site. A hacker uses the advantage of Distributed denial of service attack which occurs when the web server receives multiple requests until the server resources are overloaded and the system locks and only shuts down.
Ways of Preventing Web Attacks or Threats
The strategic manner to prevent attacks entails the primary defenses which contain parametrized queries thus constraining developers to define all the SQL code and parameter to the query which enables the database to differentiate between data and code regardless of what input is incorporated (Hein, Morozov, & Saiedian, 2011).
Escaping all User Supplied Input each DBMS slows one or more character escaping schemes definite to particular kinds of queries; thus the DBMS will not mistake that input with SQL code written by the developer, thus possible SQL injection is avoided.
White List Input Validation usually used to detect insecure input before it is processed by the application, thus preventing an attack.
Test web applications cross check the work done by the developers, by placing single quotation marks within data sent to the server, to ensure that no error responses are retrieved. Education of the developers should also be done. They are people who have the mandate to developing codes should treat coding with the seriousness it deserves to help safeguard the servers.
Role of Human Element in an Attack Scenario
In SQL injection incidence the human component plays an important role since the scripts are written and required by a developer so as to create a shadow website which in turn dupes a user within the organization of the target website to submit the valuable credentials to access the database. In this case, the credentials are the username and the password. Another scenario is portrayed when an attacker, hacker, in this instance, alters which the credentials to obtain information of online payment methods such as PayPal. The hacker even in extreme cases may loot a user money savings or even online payment transaction. Either way regarding attack the negligence of the developers to cross-check the codes may affect the website since loopholes from insecure or erroneous coding will be available for SQL injection by the attackers. The human component is also critical for the protection of such that is SQL injection since developers will upgrade their coding skills from the attacks created by the hackers. This further leads to future or even current protection of web threats from attackers, in this case, the SQL injection.
Conclusion
Web attacks evolve and become more sophisticated, it is crucial to remember to protect against attacks such as the SQL injection, malware, storage media exposure, phishing which have been the pioneer of several readily available hacker tools designed to exploit web security. Certain types of attacks, such as Distributed Denial of Service, cannot be easily avoided while others like the SQL can. Moreover, the adverse effect which can be contributed by these types of attacks can range anywhere from an inconvenience to disastrous depending on the measures incorporated.
References
Five common Web application vulnerabilities and how to avoid them. (2017). SearchSecurity. Retrieved 25 February 2017, from http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/tip/Five-common-Web-application-vulnerabilities-and-how-to-avoid-them
Singh, A., Joseph, H., & Singh, B. (2008). Vulnerability Analysis and Defense for the Internet. Boston, MA: Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.
Hein, D., Morozov, S., & Saiedian, H. (2011). A survey of client-side Web threats and counter-threat measures. Security And Communication Networks, 5(5), 535-544. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/sec.349
Top five threats. (2017). ComputerWeekly. Retrieved 25 February 2017, from http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Top-five-threats
