The very real threat of information disclosure by means of inadvertent exposure of sensitive files has been a constant source of woe for corporations and individuals alike. Despite having the potential for serious repercussions including legal ones, many webmasters, administrators and developers have struggled to…
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How to Verify a Cross-site Scripting Vulnerability
Analyzing web application vulnerabilities discovered by an automated scanner such as Acunetix often requires us to investigate further. This is in order to: Verify the vulnerability exists in the context of the application. Adjust the vulnerability payload reported by the scanner to something more invasive…
Why Scoping Cookies to Parent Domains is a Bad Idea
When dealing with Web Application vulnerability assessments, it is very common to come across scenarios where for various reasons (business or otherwise) users decide to focus entirely on Medium or High severity vulnerabilities such as SQL Injection and XML External Entity Injection. As a result,…
What is Web Cache Poisoning?
How does Caching work? All forms of Caching in computer science, whether it be CPU cache, HTTP Web Server cache, Database cache and so on, aims to speed up response times for whatever is requested. Doing so helps reduce load as much as possible on…
What is Cryptojacking?
Cryptocurrencies have taken the world by storm in the past few years, making it hard to miss all the buzz around Bitcoin and Blockchain technology. While the cryptocurrencies are far from new to cybercriminals, cryptojacking opens up new ways attackers can easily monetize compromised websites…
Web-based attacks still reign supreme according to the EU Cybersecurity Agency
Web-based attacks and malware do not just hold the cybercrime crown, but they’re on the rise — that’s according to the latest Threat Landscape Report by the EU Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA). In its sixth annual report, ENISA also reported that in…
Safely handling redirects with die() and exit() in PHP
It is frequently the case within web applications that redirects are used to direct the user to a different portion of the application. A typical example would be that of an application redirecting a user to the login page when accessing a page intended for…
Domain Fronting: Poking a hole in the Whitelist for Bypassing Firewalls
Domain Fronting is a widely popular technique that is used for evading Firewalls, DPI’s and censors. Domain Fronting takes advantage of legitimate high reputation cloud providers, more specifically, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), for evasion. This technique has been commonly used in the wild to circumvent…
What is Insecure Deserialization?
Insecure Deserialization is a vulnerability which occurs when untrusted data is used to abuse the logic of an application, inflict a denial of service (DoS) attack, or even execute arbitrary code upon it being deserialized. It also occupies the #8 spot in the OWASP Top…