As with many types of attacks, you can divide XML External Entity attacks (XXE attacks) into two types: in-band and out-of-band. In-band XXE attacks are more common and let the attacker receive an immediate response to the XXE payload. In the case of out-of-band XXE…
Nicholas Sciberras on Hack Naked News
Acunetix CTO, Nicholas Sciberras, joins Paul at Hack Naked News to discuss a recent security incident which saw white hat hackers flooding VKontakte (VK) with spam on Valentine’s Day. This was part of a revenge prank against the Russian social network after the company failed…
All about Man-in-the-Middle Attacks
In a man-in-the-middle attack (MITM), a black hat hacker takes a position between two victims who are communicating with one another. In this spot, the attacker relays all communication, can listen to it, and even modify it. Imagine that Alice and Barbara talk to one…
GIF Buffer Content Exposed by Facebook Messenger
The saying one man’s trash is another man’s treasure applies to IT security as well. There are several types of attacks, such as buffer overflow, that rely on accessing leftover memory content. For example, this is exactly what the infamous Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL was…
What is Local File Inclusion (LFI)?
An attacker can use Local File Inclusion (LFI) to trick the web application into exposing or running files on the web server. An LFI attack may lead to information disclosure, remote code execution, or even Cross-site Scripting (XSS). Typically, LFI occurs when an application uses…
DAST vs SAST: A Case for Dynamic Application Security Testing
Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) is a black-box security testing methodology in which an application is tested from the outside. A tester using DAST examines an application when it is running and tries to hack it just like an attacker would. On the other end…
Remote Code Execution Possible in Drupal
On February 19, Drupal released a security advisory PSA-2019-02-19 (further amended by PSA-2019-02-22). The advisory contains information about a critical security flaw in Drupal 8.5 and 8.6 core. This flaw, classified as CVE-2019-6340, can be used for remote code execution (code injection). An exploit for…
Exploiting SQL Injection: a Hands-on Example
In this series, we will be showing step-by-step examples of common attacks. We will start off with a basic SQL Injection attack directed at a web application and leading to privilege escalation to OS root. SQL Injection is one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities a…
Critical CSRF Vulnerability on Facebook
A security researcher Youssef Sammouda (Samm0uda) recently discovered a critical CSRF (Cross-site Request Forgery) security vulnerability on Facebook. This security issue could have been used to take over any Facebook user account. Samm0uda reported the bug on January 26 and Facebook fixed it just 5…