Open web application security project (OWASP) is a non-profit organization that works with the goal of helping website owners and security experts to protect web applications from cyber-attacks. For the purpose to perform security assessments and research OWASP has more than 30,000 volunteers around the world. It represents a broad consensus about the most critical security risks to web applications.

Top 10 Web Application Security Risks

SQL Injection

SQL injection is a type of attack that makes it possible to execute malicious SQL statements. These statements control a database server behind a web application. An SQL injection vulnerability may affect any web application or website that works or uses a SQL database.

Broken Authentication

Authentication always ensures that only a legitimate user can access the information and privileges on the web application. It gets broken whenever an attacker tries to bypass the process and pretend to be a legitimate user on the application. Such cases occur when the credentials of valid users may be stolen or hijacked for access to the application.

Sensitive Data Exposure

Sensitive data exposure means letting unauthorized parties access stored or transmitted sensitive information such as debit or credit card numbers, passwords. For prevention of such kinds of attacks, we should define clearly at the time of building a web application that what are the data we consider to be sensitive data.

XML External Entities (XXE)

XML external entity attack is a type of attack against an application that parses XML input. This attack mostly occurs when XML input that contains a reference to an external entity is processed by a weakly configured XML parser. For example: – the application that accepts XML directly or XML uploads from untrusted sources, or inserts untrusted data into XML documents, which is further parsed by an XML processor.

Broken Access Control

Bypassing access control checks by modifying the URL, or HTML page or simply using a custom API attack tool. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality such as access other users’ accounts, view sensitive files, modify data of other users, change the rights of access, etc.

Security Misconfiguration

Security misconfiguration is the issue that happens most commonly. This is the result of incomplete and insecure default configurations, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information.

Cross-Site Scripting

The Cross-site scripting attack that is also known as XSS attack is the type of injection attack that injects malicious code into the website, most commonly client-side JavaScript to an end-user. XSS occurs when an attacker tricks a web application into sending data in a form that a user’s browser can execute. Most commonly, this is a combination of HTML and XSS provided by the attacker, XSS can also be used to deliver malicious downloads, plugins, or other media content. An attacker is able to trick a web application this way when the web application permits data from an untrusted source.

Insecure Deserialization

Serialization means converting an object in a format for saving it to a file or database or sending it via streams or networks, The deserialization processes are just the opposite of serialization, insecure deserialization is a vulnerability in which an unknown or untrusted data is used to execute code, bypass authentication or further abuse the logic behind the application, the most common example of an insecure deserialization vulnerability is when attacker loads untrusted code into a serialized object, which is then forwarded to the web application, also sometimes referred as an “object injection” vulnerability.

Using Components With Known Vulnerabilities

When we are using components such as software modules, frameworks, and other libraries, run with the same privileges as the application. If any of the vulnerable components are exploited, such kind of attack can be a serious cause of data loss or server takeover.

Insufficient Logging & Monitoring

Logging is the process of keeping track of all the activities and interactions happening in your network and alarm such suspicious activities, monitoring consists of observing the system logs and searching for anomalies. insufficient logging and monitoring can be a bad practice, in fact whenever an attacker tries to infiltrate the target then the system generates logs that don’t correspond to your normal system activity, if we can’t monitor or detect such deviations in our network then it can be a vulnerability.

Security in any organization is one of the most important aspects and Zindagi Technologies will give you the right security and implementation of our services and resources.

Zindagi Technologies is an IT consultancy and professional services organization based out of New Delhi, India. We’re experts in large-scale data center design and deployment, service provider network design, information security, blockchain, IoT, Smart Cities, and Private/Public/Hybrid cloud solutions. Each one of us has years of experience in large-scale network design, deployment, and automation. You can reach out to us on +91- 9773973971 or visit our office.

Author
Sameer Vats
Associate Consultant