Web and mobile applications are becoming increasingly feature-rich to accommodate growing consumer demands. While organizations focus on faster release cycles to meet market trends, application security is often considered an afterthought. According to Veracode's 10th State of Software Security Report, out of 85,000 applications that were analyzed, 83% of them had at least one flaw in the initial scan. Of these, the most common flaws were the general category of information leakage (64%), followed by cryptographic issues (62%), and CRLF injection (61%). Most data breaches occur due to security vulnerability exploits.
Application security vulnerabilities refer to any weakness, or a system flaw in an application that can be exploited to trigger a security breach. Once cybercriminals are aware of an application security vulnerability, they might use specific tools or methods to exploit the vulnerability and launch an attack.
According to OWASP Top 10 2021,here are some of the common techniques attackers use to hijack applications:
This vulnerability is common in applications with poor authentication and access control policies. Attackers might exploit broken access controls to access restricted systems and files. These vulnerabilities are classified into horizontal, vertical, or privilege-based escalation vulnerabilities based on the type of user privileges.
These flaws of data in transit and at rest can serve as an entry point for vulnerability exploitation. This is especially true of data that is handled under different privacy laws, such as GDPR and PCI DSS. Some common causes for cryptographic failures include the use of weak or outdated cryptographic protocols, and insufficient verification of internet traffic. The risk of exposing sensitive data can be minimized by strong data encryption and key management protocols.
In this attack technique, a hacker injects malicious code by exploiting the insecure code in an application. If successful, they can trick the application into executing a code of their choice as though it were from an authorized user. Injection attacks are commonly used to gain access to backend data stores and hijack other users' sessions. Some common injection attacks include SQL injections, LDAP injections, and CRLF injections.
This category is dedicated to vulnerabilities that might occur when the application design best practices are not followed properly. Some notable examples include Generation of Error Message Containing Sensitive Information (CWE-209), and Plaintext Storage of a Password (CWE-256). These vulnerabilities can be avoided by adhering to a secure development lifecycle that is based on secure design patterns.
Security misconfigurations are common in applications that are not compliant with industry security standards, such as CIS benchmarks. These vulnerabilities arise when the security settings are not defined or implemented correctly, or when the security hardening of any application stack is weak. These vulnerabilities can be prevented by limiting access to administrator interfaces, disabling the continued usage of default passwords, and disabling the unnecessary features or services.
When the session management and authentication functions are poor, attackers might be able to impersonate legitimate users' identities. Some of the common security-related weaknesses associated with identification and authentication failures include improperly hashed and salted passwords, and irregular application session timeouts. Implementing MFA is commonly used to mitigate the exploitation of identification and authentication failures.
Logs and audit trails are crucial to gain visibility into an organization's activities. When the critical information logs are not monitored properly, the engineers are forced to spend more time searching for them and less time actually solving the problem. For instance, when login failures and input validation failures from servers are logged along with the context, you might be able to recognize suspicious login activities.
The two most recent versions of the OWASP Top 10 application vulnerabilities lists emphasize the importance of good vulnerability management practices and processes. Adopting a "secure by design" model delivers a proactive approach to minimize application security vulnerabilities.