Juniper backdoor mystery, NSA are at least partly to blame Last week, tech company Juniper Networks who sell corporate networking solutions, disclosed that they had discovered two unauthorised encryption backdoors in their firewalls. Encryption backdoors will immediately grab attention as one of the surveillance methods…
Authenticated scans more effective! How?
The majority of web applications today make use of a login mechanism where the user must supply a set of credentials in order to navigate to authenticated areas of the web application. This allows access to restricted content and content that is customised to the…
Website hack: Help, my website has been hacked! What to do now?
Here we identify 4 practical steps SMEs can plan for and implement when they become a victim of a website hack. With the massive growth in cyber-crime, it’s a sad fact that it’s highly likely to become a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’. Below…
Defence in Depth – Final Part – Update software, Isolate services
Update software and components Whether it’s a server’s operating system, a web server, a database server or even a client-side JavaScript library, an application should not be running software with known vulnerabilities. Updating, removing or replacing software or components with known vulnerabilities sounds obvious, but…
Defence in Depth – Part 4 – Validate everything, Parameterize SQL queries
Trust no one, validate everything Unfortunately, most vulnerabilities at the application layer can’t simply be patched by applying an update. In order to fix web application vulnerabilities, software engineers often need to correct mistakes within the application code. It’s therefore ideal for software engineers to…
New Acunetix update includes security checks for Joomla! Core RCE, improved XXE tests and more
New updates have been released that test for a new Joomla! remote code execution vulnerability affecting versions 1.5.0 through 3.4.5 CVE-2015-8562. Other updates also include improved XML External Entity (XXE) testing, multiple Cross-site Scripting tests in commonly used libraries and other improvements/bug fixes. Below is the…
Webroot report shows SMBs unprepared to counter cyber security attacks
A number of big name retailers, insurance providers and companies have hit the headlines with their cyber attacks and data breaches over the last year or two. But what about the small and medium businesses? There’s no doubt they have their own security incidents but…
In the headlines: Mr Grey hacker, Vtech hack, US government office hack and more
FBI hunting ‘Mr Grey’ hacker and his 1.2 billion stolen logins In a massive botnet operation which stole data from over 420,000 websites, the FBI are now zoning in on one member of a Russian crime ring known as ‘CyberVor’, with their target being known…
Defence in Depth – Part 3 – The Least Privilege Principle
An application does not need to use the root (MySQL), sa (Microsoft SQL Server), postgres (PostgreSQL) or SYSDBA (Oracle Database) to connect to the database. Likewise, it’s a bad idea to run daemons or services as root (Linux) or Administrator (Microsoft Windows), unless there is…