Cyber Security Threats You Must Know as a Web Developer

People rely on the internet for any sort of information whether it is businesses, products, or services, etc. Website is often your first impression of the business and most of the time it’s the initial means of communication. Collecting lots of valuable information online such as transaction details, user data and many more makes the website a critical part of a corporation. Also, it makes the business and process vulnerable.

No matter how much you try to improve the security of the website, hackers develop a new method to find a loophole and breach the system. Therefore, maintaining the Cyber Security is important. A Web Application Security Training can help you to learn more about these threats on Web Application.

In this blog, we will discuss certain Cyber Security threats you must know as a web developer.

WannaCry

In May of 2017, a ransomware worm named WannaCry spread rapidly across several computer networks. The whole purpose of the functionality of WannaCry is not entirely clear. Even after being successfully infected, it won’t necessarily begin to encrypt files. Before performing its operation, WannaCry first tries to access a very long, gibberish URL. After that, if it can successfully access that domain, it locks itself down.

Some guessed that this was supposed to gain this edge on the attack. But, the British security researcher, Marcus Hutchins, who found that WannaCry was trying to reach this URL, assumes that it was intended to make the code interpretation more complex.

Injection Flaws

Injection flaws enable the attackers to transmit malicious code within an application to a different system. There are different types of methods to call these attacks such as shell commands, system calls, as well as backend databases via SQL injection.

The attacker provides an untrusted input to a program, this input gets processed by an interpreter as part of a command or query. Consequently, this modifies the execution of the program.

Scripts written in any language such as Perl, Python, etc can be injected into poorly designed applications and executed.

Session Hijacking Attack

Every unique user is assigned a “session ID” when they log-in to a website, which remains active for a certain time during the transmission of the information.

In a session hijacking attack, the attacker takes advantage of the active session between the victim and the server and intervenes in the session of another user, fetching information as it transfers between the user and the server.

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability attack

Cross-site scripting or XSS is one of the most common attacks used by hackers to take control of customer’s confidential and sensitive information. It is one of the most dangerous and malicious attacks that attempt to gain access to the user’s browser by taking advantage of the vulnerabilities in the application.

XSS attacks target the users of vulnerable applications, there are two types of XSS attacks:

• Stored XSS
• Reflected XSS

Broken Authentication

This is the type of attack that allows an attacker to either capture or bypass the authentication methods which is in the process by the web application. The main aim of this attack is to take over the user’s account to gain the same benefits as the user.

These attacks occur due to the following reasons:

• Vulnerable Session ID
• Predictable Login Credentials
• Unprotected user authentication credentials.
• Session ID does not timeout.
• Session value does not get invalidated after logout.
• Passwords, session IDs spread over unencrypted connections.

Conclusion

Hackers attack web application to steal sensitive online data, blackmail people and steal money, create chaos in the society and ruin the company’s reputation. Cybercrime can cause huge damage to the company, from the economy to products and the customers. Therefore, web developers can pursue Web Application Security Course to learn about these threats and their prevention methods.