Hacking-How can your application be vulnerable?

Over the past few years, hackers have gotten increasingly clever. They’re using new tactics and techniques, like trying to socially engineer you into giving up your password (we’ll talk about that more below). 

This article provides you with information about how an application can be hacked as well as what steps need to be taken in order to safeguard your application from these foreseeable cyber-attacks.

A step by step guide is given on how hackers can access your app and what security precautions should be taken against them. Understanding the vulnerabilities of your app will help you determine what courses of action should be taken in order to keep it intact and secure until its retirement or replacement.

The article covers a wide range of topics from the OWASP Top Ten to the typical web app vulnerabilities, allowing you to assess your application against these problems and determine what countermeasures should be taken.

There are some simple precautions you can take to safeguard your accounts from these outside threats, though. Here at https://freeopinionist.com/ has some more information on how your application can be vulnerable.

We hope this blog post will help teach you how to protect yourself from being hacked!

Let’s begin by going through the OWASP Top 10 Web Application Security Risks.

1.OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project).

It is an international community made up of individual contributors, corporate members, and supporters that are focused on improving the security of software applications. 

It is the leading organisation that provides free and open-source software testing tools to detect vulnerabilities in web applications. These tools can be used by developers throughout all phases of development (from design to deployment).

2.Injection Flaws.

Data validation with a defense mechanism to injection attacks. Where a user is expected to enter data, that data should be validated before being processed further. An input validation defence against all types of injection attacks, including SQL, NoSQL, XML and LDAP – that filters out malicious content and blocks an attacker from injecting code into your application.

3.XML Injection Attacks.

XML Injection goes under the category of Injection Attacks as described in the OWASP Top 10 web application vulnerabilities list . An attacker can exploit this weakness by sending specially crafted XML requests to the application. 

These manipulated requests may create or delete other entities, or they may exploit software vulnerabilities by reading or modifying resident data. 

The attacker can use XML injection attacks to read protected data, disclose sensitive information, change public information about the documents, insert malicious script code into elements within an application’s response and bypass intended access restrictions.

4.Cross-site scripting (XSS) Attacks.

XSS attacks are often compared to SQL injection attacks because they both allow an attacker to inject code into another website’s script files to control its functionality. XSS is also often compared to command injection attacks because they both involve injecting code into website responses, and they can both be used to run malicious code on a targeted website. 

The main difference between the two is that XSS vulnerabilities allow malicious code to be executed in the victim’s browser, while command injection vulnerabilities allow malicious code to be executed on the server.

5.Broken Authentication and Session Management.

Many applications do not verify session validity upon login and rely on the presence of a session cookie for authentication purposes. 

This may cause some interesting situations, such as when an application allows for more than one user with valid credentials to log in simultaneously and continue working on shared data without knowing about another person’s activity.

6.Insecure Direct Object References.

The OWASP Insecure Direct Object Reference Prevention Cheat Sheet describes how attackers may use direct object references to access your data and how you can protect yourself from this type of web application vulnerability.

In the case of an Insecure Direct Object Reference, a web application gives direct access to objects it should not give direct access to, allowing attackers to bypass authorization and gain access to data that they should not have any rights over.

7.Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF).

A Cross Site Request Forgery, or CSRF attack exploits the trust a user has for a particular site into sending a malicious request from their browser without them knowing about it. 

A malicious hacker can exploit this flaw of a website by entering a form on a legitimate site and submitting the form to a site under their control. Upon submitting the form to a malicious site, the victim’s browser will be redirected to the malicious site.

8.Forgery Attack via Password Reset Functionality.

A password reset function is usually found in many applications that allow users to reset their password, enable them to change their details on the application and even prevent access for any unauthorized user. 

Unfortunately, Applications that have such functionality leave it from checking if that particular session belongs for that particular user on the server side. This means that any attacker may send an email requesting for a password reset with valid credentials belonging to whoever wants it.