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…
Paul’s Security Weekly Episode: Web App Scanning with Authentication.
Benjamin Daniel Mussler, Senior Security Researcher at Acunetix meets with Paul at Paul’s Security Weekly to discuss how Acunetix handles authentication to broaden the scan surface and why a web vulnerability scanner should be able to log into protected areas.
Acunetix Web Application Vulnerability Report 2019
Acunetix compiles an annual web application vulnerability report. The purpose of this report is to provide security experts and interested parties with an analysis of data on vulnerabilities gathered over the previous year. The 2019 report contains the results and analysis of vulnerabilities, detected from…
A fresh look on reverse proxy related attacks
In recent years, several researches have been published about attacks deliberately or directly related to reverse proxies. While implementing various reverse-proxy checks on the scanner, I started analyzing implementations of reverse proxies. Initially, I wanted to analyze how both reverse proxies and web servers parse…