In the past few days, a site selling Durex condoms have had a small ‘exposure’ problem. As reported, the site had been suffering (time length unknown) from several basic security exposures, including even allowing orders to be viewed online, without a login – simply by…
Security usability and accessibility
Recently security and accessibility issues have become an important topic to me. Although I had always considered accessibility and more specifically usability important in my designs, since I’m now down to one active hand two to a surgery on the other hand, I am now…
Creating a Web security testing policy
If you’re reading this blog, Web security testing is undoubtedly on your radar. You may have an ongoing process for testing Web vulnerabilities but do you actually have a policy for it? I’m all about keep things simple with security and, when you think about…
The new OWASP Top 10 for 2010 – Risk and Realities
Kudos to Jeff Williams, Dave Wichers, and the rest of the OWASP team for pulling together the final release of the OWASP Top 10 for 2010. Obviously, a lot of thought and work has gone into this new version. One thing that really jumps out…
XSS redirect attack – root compromized via simple tricky redirect
As the attacks on infrastructure become more complicated, the true nature of deep penetration attacks prove food for thought for all developers and operators. Consider this case – where the Apache open source infrastructure itself became significantly exposed by a simple XSS attack that utilized…
The road to glory, from XSS to Root on apache.org
On the 9th of April 2010, Apache.org infrastructure suffered a direct and targeted attack on the server hosting the Apache issue-tracking software, Atlassian JIRA. This is the second major compromise the Apache Software Foundation suffered in less than a year, when last August, the main…
VIDEO: Exploiting a Cross Site Scripting vulnerability in Mambo CMS
In this video we look into the details of how an attacker is able to exploit a Cross Site Scripting vulnerability in Mambo CMS (version: 4.6.5), discovered by Bogdan Calin with Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner. This vulnerability is affecting a POST parameter in the Mambo…
Fighting Web flaws is futile
Do you ever find yourself driving down the road in an unfamiliar place and you get that gut feeling that you’re headed in the wrong direction? Well, I feel that’s exactly where we are with application security – heading in the wrong direction. First off,…
The top Web vulnerability we face
I recently took some time off which gave me the opportunity to clear my head and think about some of the big issues we’re facing with Internet security. I thought if I had to pick one thing, what would be the greatest Web vulnerability out…