A new report has just been published, covering the current state of cybersecurity in the US healthcare sector. Considering the very public breaches of Anthem and other health insurers over the last year, the sector is particularly under scrutiny. Unfortunately the results are not very…
PWC Global State of Information Security Survey 2016
Price Waterhouse Coopers have just published a report about cybersecurity. Not about the attacks and threats themselves, but about how businesses are tackling the risks. Titled the Global State of Information Security Survey 2016, its key findings relate to measures such as external collaboration and…
Defence in depth – Part 2 – Security before obscurity
Fail-safe defaults Software is bound to fail. Try as we might to create perfect, failure-resistant software, bugs will always exist that might cause software to fail. Notwithstanding this, it is important that this potential failure does not expose an application to a security risk. An…
In the headlines: Anonymous vs ISIS, Australian attorney general, NTP and DDoS exploits
Anonymous vs ISIS Naturally, even cybersecurity news in this past week has centred around ISIS in the wake of the Paris attacks. The main headline has come from Anonymous, who have again but more formally waged ‘war’ on ISIS themselves. So far their efforts seem…
Defence in depth and how it applies to web applications – Part 1
Information security generally refers to defending information from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification or deletion from threats. Organizations are constantly facing threats that exist both externally as well as internally — be they from nation states, political activists, corporate competitors or even disgruntled employees….
SQLi part 6: Out-of-band SQLi
Out-of-band SQL injection is not very common, mostly because it depends on features being enabled on the database server being used by the web application. Out-of-band SQL injection occurs when an attacker is unable to use the same channel to launch the attack and gather…
SQLi part 5: Inferential SQLi (Blind SQLi)
Inferential SQL injection, unlike in-band SQLi, may take longer for an attacker to exploit, however, it is just as dangerous as any other form of SQL injection. In an inferential SQLi attack, no data is actually transferred via the web application and the attacker would…
The Draft UK Investigatory Powers Bill
This week a draft ‘Investigatory Powers Bill’ was released by Home Secretary Theresa May and is receiving a great deal of media intention, instead being dubbed the UK ‘Surveillance Bill’. What’s it for? The bill is introduced as being for consolidation of all the laws…
New vBulletin pre-authentication RCE 0-day discovered, being used in the wild
A high-severity Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability has been identified in the latest version of vBulletin. The 0-day vulnerability in the popular forum software, came to light when when vBulletin’s developers released a security update for versions 5.1.4 through 5.1.9 of the software on Monday…