...O Foreword About OWASP About OWASP The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an open community dedicated to enabling organizations to develop, purchase, and maintain applications that can be trusted. At OWASP you’ll find free and open … • Application security tools and standards • Complete books on application security testing, secure code development, and security code review • Standard security controls and libraries • Local chapters worldwide • Cutting edge research • Extensive conferences worldwide • Mailing lists • And more … all at www.owasp.org All of the OWASP tools, documents, forums, and chapters are free and open to anyone interested in improving application security. We advocate approaching application security as a people, process, and technology problem, because the most effective approaches to application security require improvements in all of these areas. OWASP is a new kind of organization. Our freedom from commercial pressures allows us to provide unbiased, practical, cost-effective information about application security. OWASP is not affiliated with any technology company, although we support the informed use of commercial security technology. Similar to many open-source software projects, OWASP produces many types of materials in a collaborative, open way. The OWASP Foundation is the non-profit entity that ensures the project’s long-term success. Almost everyone associated with OWASP is a volunteer, including the OWASP Board, Global Committees...
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...Deploying Application Firewall in Defense in Depth Principle Abstract Information security should be a priority for businesses, especially when they are increasingly involved in electronic commerce. With the understanding that securing an operating system successfully requires taking a systematic and comprehensive approach, security practitioners have recommended a layered approach called defense-in-depth. The cost and complexity of deploying multiple security technologies has prevented many organizations from achieving their information security goal. In view of these constraints and in compliance with recent with recent corporate and industry regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, businesses now deploy application firewalls as security measures. Based on the foregoing, the author has recommended the use of application firewalls as a single platform for achieving layered security through network protection, application protection and data protection. This paper commences by examining the defense in depth theory and the types of application firewall and the author concludes by citing the Institute for Computing Applications (IAC) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) as an example of an organization which engaged application firewalls in resolving its network security problem. Research Analysis/ Body The development of Information security is of paramount importance to organizations that have online presence...
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...test is a method of evaluating the security of a computer system or network by methodically validating and verifying the effectiveness of application security controls. A web application security test focuses only on evaluating the security of a web application. The process involves an active analysis of the application for any weaknesses, technical flaws, or vulnerabilities. Any security issues that are found will be presented to the system owner, together with an assessment of the impact, a proposal for mitigation or a technical solution (Open Web Application Security Project [OWASP], 2014a). Vulnerability is a flaw or weakness in a system's design, implementation, operation or management that could be exploited to compromise the system's security objectives. A threat is anything such as a malicious external attacker, an internal user, or a system instability that can harm the owner’s assets by an application or resource of value, such as data in a database or in the file system by exploiting vulnerabilities. A test is an action to demonstrate that an application meets the security requirements of its stakeholders (OWASP, 2014a). Test to Be Performed The first phase in security assessment is focused on collecting as much information as possible about a target application. Information Gathering is the most critical step of an application security test. The security test should endeavor to test as much of the code base as possible. Thus mapping all possible paths through...
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...CompTIA Security+: Get Certified Get Ahead SY0-401 Study Guide Darril Gibson Dedication To my wife, who even after 22 years of marriage continues to remind me how wonderful life can be if you’re in a loving relationship. Thanks for sharing your life with me. Acknowledgments Books of this size and depth can’t be done by a single person, and I’m grateful for the many people who helped me put this book together. First, thanks to my wife. She has provided me immeasurable support throughout this project. The technical editor, Steve Johnson, provided some good feedback throughout the project. If you have the paperback copy of the book in your hand, you’re enjoying some excellent composite editing work done by Susan Veach. I’m extremely grateful for all the effort Karen Annett put into this project. She’s an awesome copy editor and proofer and the book is tremendously better due to all the work she’s put into it. While I certainly appreciate all the feedback everyone gave me, I want to stress that any technical errors that may have snuck into this book are entirely my fault and no reflection on anyone who helped. I always strive to identify and remove every error, but they still seem to sneak in. About the Author Darril Gibson is the CEO of YCDA, LLC (short for You Can Do Anything). He has contributed to more than 35 books as the sole author, a coauthor, or a technical editor. Darril regularly writes, consults, and teaches on a wide variety of technical...
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...executing business operations. Organizations and government agencies have to adopt ethical hacking tools in order secure important documents and sensitive information (Harold F. Tipton and Micki Krause, 2004). Ethical hacker professionals have to be hired in order to test the networks effectively. Ethical hackers perform security measure on behalf of the organization owners. In order to bring out the ethical hacking efforts perfectly a proper plan must be executed. Ethical hacking has the ability to suggest proper security tools that can avoid attacks on the networks. Hacking tools can be used for email systems, data bases and voice over internet protocol applications in order to make communications securely. Ethical hacking can also be known as penetration testing which can be used for networks, applications and operating systems (Jeff Forristal and Julie Traxler, 2001). Using hacking tools is a best method for identifying the attacks before it effect the entire organization. Ethical hackers are nothing but authorized users for the sensitive information or networks of an organization. Using hacking techniques for handling employees in organization and for solving critical judicial cases is not a crime. An ethical hacker use same tools and actions as performed by normal hacker. The main aspect in ethical hacking is that target permission is essential for performing...
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...in targeted attacks on enterprises; the continued growth of social networking sites as an attack distribution platform; and a change in attackers’ infection tactics, increasingly targeting vulnerabilities in Java to break into traditional computer systems. In addition, the report explores how attackers are exhibiting a notable shift in focus toward mobile devices. Targeted attacks Targeted attacks such as Hydraq and Stuxnet posed a growing threat to enterprises in 2010. To increase the likelihood of successful, undetected infiltration into the enterprise, an increasing number of these targeted attacks leveraged zero-day vulnerabilities to break into computer systems. Stuxnet and Hydraq teach future attackers that the easiest vulnerability to exploit is our trust of friends and colleagues. Stuxnet could not have breached its target without someone being given trusted access with a USB key. Meanwhile, Hydraq would not have been successful without convincing users that the links and attachments they received in an email were from a trusted source. Social Networks Social network platforms continue to grow in popularity and this popularity has not surprisingly attracted a large volume of malware. One of the primary attack techniques used on social networking sites involved the use of shortened URLs. Under typical, legitimate, circumstances, these abbreviated URLs are used to efficiently share a link in an email or on a web page to an otherwise complicated web address. The...
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...Hacking Countermeasures & Techniques Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Best Practices Guide to Counter DDoS attacks: This Guide will cover Best Practices to counter DDoS attacks like the attack on the Universities Registration System Server (RSS) by infected computers (Bots). The attack by rogue software installed on computers located in University Computer Labs resulted in the shutting down web access to the RSS system. Coordinated by a central controller these Bots established web connections (HTTP protocol) to the RSS using up all available bandwidth. This prevented students from accessing the Web site/server for legitimate traffic during the attack. (Schifreen, R. (2006)) This is considered a Consumption of Resources attack using up all the resources of RSS bandwidth. (Specht, S. M., & Lee, R. B. (2004)) These best practices would help prevent and/or reduce the effects of such attacks. Industry best practices to counter DDoS attacks start with documentation that addresses procedures to be followed before, during, and after an attack. (Schifreen, R. (2006)) The establishment of a Security Incident Response Team (SIPT) trained to react to incidents reduces damage and duration of outages. Best practices include; training, network configuration, patch management, access control lists, encryption, intrusion detection, intrusion prevention, and traffic shaping. (Cunningham, B, Dykstra, T, Fuller, E, Gatford, C, Gold, A, Hoagberg, M, Hubbard, A, Little, C, Manzuik, S,...
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...Cyber-attacks are a major problem to businesses as well as home users, it is in every nook, and cranny in the world of computers and prevention is a major concern to all. Many websites have contracted viruses or denial of service attacks and some host malware. Unsuspecting visitors visit these sites and contracted the spyware, malware, or viruses to their own home computer. What can we do for this? Well, there are preventive measures that one can take companies or home users. To find preventive measures the user must first understand the hacker and how they work. The vulnerabilities of one’s network are those call weaknesses or holes, hackers love these and can scan a system for days trying to find them. It is the administrator or IT department to find these such holes and find a way to abolish them before they are inundated with the chaos the hackers bring forth. Agreeing with “HackingAlert” the prevention is more difficult and complex in real life (HackingAlert). A large threat and a near fatal threat is the malware, it is used to capture vital information from the user’s computer, such as logins and passwords. This type of information is used in high-risk areas such as banking information. It can be well hidden in applications like a PowerPoint presentation, email, instant messenger, or a Web Site may have it hidden or embedded in the site itself. This paper will discuss these measures in hopes to educate the user in open-minded scenarios. First thing to know is that there...
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...businesses in this IT era. These applications hosted on the web generate different benefits like easy accessibility, fast communication but also create many issues like Denial of Service (DoS), Cross Site Scripting (XSS), Authentication Bypass, etc. These attacks can cause millions in loss for the organization. Therefore, an effective and efficient security software solutions are required so that these attacks can be prevented well in advanced. In this report, a solution is proposed for Advanced Research Company so that it can manage against potential DOS and DDOS attacks. With the rising competition and being in limelight, the company has painted itself a target to its competitors. There have been some scenarios in the past when an attempt was made to compromise the information of the company. GoldenEye software is used for describing the mentioned case. The software will help to identify the DOS attacks. Brief overview of DOS and DDOS attacks Denial of Service is an attack which disrupts the normal functionality of an Information system. The source of the attack may be local or global. Its main aim is the disruption of services so that the targeted service will be unavailable for the users. The DDOS attack is a type of the DOS attack. In this attack, a large number of hosts are utilized to accomplish the required attack. There can be 1000 of hosts involved in this task and they are also known as “bots” or “zombies”. These attacks are of multi-dimensional type...
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...Web Server Security and Database Server Security Databases involve distributed updates and queries, while supporting confidentiality, integrity, availability, and privacy (Goodrich, & Tamassia, 2011). This entails robust access control as well as tools for detection and recovering from errors (2011). When database information is masked, there is still a possibility of an attacker garnishing sensitive data from additional database information that is available, this can be achieved and called an inference attack (2011). For databases, strategies have been designed to mitigate against inference attacks. Cell suppression is a technique used to combat an inference attack, by removing various cells in a database, and are left blank for published versions (2011). The objective is to suppress the critical cells that have relatively important information in them from being obtained in an attack (2011). Another strategy is called Generalization, and this involves replacing published versions of database information with general values (2011). Such as stating a specific date of birth with a range of years, thus a person born in 1990 could be generalized as a range 1985-1992. The critical values are intertwined with the actual values, so they are less discernable in an inference attack (2011). A Noise Addition technique can also be utilized. This requires adding randomized values to real values in a published database (2011). This provides “noise” for all the records of the...
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...Lab 1 Assessment Worksheet Develop an Attack & Penetration Plan 1. List the 5 steps of the hacking process. * Reconnaissance * Scanning * Gaining Access * Maintaining Access * Covering Tracks 2. In order to exploit or attack the targeted systems, the first initial step I would do to collect as much information as possible about the targets prior to devising an attack and penetration test plan would be reconnaissance. I would use passive reconnaissance as this pertains to information gathering. 3. The reconnaissance phase can have many different faces, and depending on the goal of the attacker, various tools and applications can be used. Nslookup can be used to look up all the available host on a network through the DNS server. You can get IP address information of hosts on your targeted network. You can also get the information of the purpose of the hosts. Whois lookup is a protocol that can be used to interrogate the servers operated by regional internet registries which holds information about every IP/Domain registered on the internet. You can get information about your target such as; the name of the owner, address of the owner. IP ranges that a certain IP belongs to, contact information like emails and phone numbers, administrators names and server names. You can also just use your targets web site. Sometimes the targets website can reveal way too much information without realizing it, and just by looking at the information they have...
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...the need for data protection to ensure that customer’s personal data is kept same during all points of the application and loan process. Implementing online loan applications means customer information will be input into web forms and then transferred to the company database. This creates the potential for hackers to steal or corrupt the data and to use it to gain access to other company servers. In order to prevent this from occurring and limiting the damage done in the case of a successful attack McBride must implement a Prevention, Detection, and Recovery plan. Prevention A prevention plan for McBride will be need to include protection for the company servers and protection for client information. The first step in this plan is to establish a demilitarized zone (DMZ) to separate the web server from the company databases and other company servers. The most secure way to implement this is to use two firewalls. The first one will be set to allow necessary traffic to the web server and to block malicious code. It will have a looser configuration to ensure that clients do not have issues gaining access to needed applications or services. The second firewall will be set to stricter configurations to prevent any malicious code that gets past the first firewall from entering the company network. Different brands and types of firewalls will also be used in this scenario to...
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...Reading Room This paper is from the SANS Institute Reading Room site. Reposting is not permitted without express written permission. Web Based Attacks Copyright SANS Institute Author Retains Full Rights fu ll r igh ts. ins ut ho rr eta Web Based Attacks 07 ,A GCIA Gold Certification te 20 Key fingerprint = AF19 Justin Crist, jcrist@secureworks.com Author: FA27 2F94 998D FDB5 DE3D F8B5 06E4 A169 4E46 © SA NS In sti tu Adviser: Jim Purcell © SANS Institute 2007, As part of the Information Security Reading Room Author retains full rights. Web Based Attacks Abstract Attacks upon information security infrastructures have continued to evolve steadily overtime; legacy network based attacks have largely been replaced by more sophisticated This paper will introduce fu ll r igh ts. web application based attacks. and address web based attacks from attack to detection. Information security professionals new to application layer attacks will be in a better position to understand the ins underlying application attack vectors and methods of 07 ,A ut ho rr eta mitigation after reading this paper. © SA NS In sti tu te 20 Key fingerprint = AF19 FA27 2F94 998D FDB5 DE3D F8B5 06E4 A169 4E46 Justin Crist © SANS Institute 2007, 2 As part of the Information Security Reading Room Author retains full rights. Web Based Attacks Table of Contents Abstract.................................................................... 2 Table of Contents.................
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...ABSTRACT This term paper discusses the security exposures of a server that occur due to a SQL injection flaw in a web application that communicate with a database. Over ten years have passed since a famous hacker coined the term “SQL injection” and it is still considered one of the major application threats. A lot has been said on this vulnerability, but not all of the aspects and implications have been uncovered, yet. This paper aim is to collate some of the existing knowledge, introduce new techniques and demonstrate how to get complete control over the database management system's underlying operating system, file system and internal network through SQL injection vulnerability in over-looked and theoretically not exploitable scenarios. This paper also discuss about the prevention from the SQL Injection, not only in ORACLE but also in PHP, C#, JAVA and other languages. INDEX ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………….....02 INTRODUCTION……………….…………………………….…….………………………….04 BLIND SQL INJECTION…………………………………….………………………………..05 SQL INJECTION OVERVIEW…………………………….………………………………....06 CATEGORIES OF SQL INJECTION ATTACKS…………………………………………..07 WHAT’S VULNERABLE…………………………………………………………..…………08 WHAT’S NOT VULNERABLE…………………………………………………….………….08 SQL INJECTION METHODS……………………………………….……………….……….09 SQL MANIPULATION………………………………………………………..……………….09 CODE INJECTION……………………………………………………….……………………10 FUNCTION CALL INJECTION……………………………………………………………….11 BUFFER OVERFLOWS………………………………………………………………………13 ...
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...Describe the best practice to employ to mitigate malware effects on a machine. At present, Mal-ware attacks are the biggest challenge in IT organizations. Previously attackers would actively search for and infect the user or employee systems. However, the security systems are greatly deployed in installing firewalls so that the hackers can't get in through the user systems. This malware distribution evolved to pull based model where the user unknowingly enters into some websites where malware functions are installed and the user becomes the victim of these attacks. Some of the main reasons that lead to these infections are web server vulnerabilities, where the hacker gain access to a web server where multiple applications with a lot of web content are...
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