Remote debuggers as an attack vector

Over the course of the past year, our team added many new checks to the Acunetix scanner. Several of these checks were related to the debug modes of web applications as well as components/panels used for debugging. These debug modes and components/panels often have misconfigurations,…

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Exploiting SSTI in Thymeleaf

One of the most comfortable ways to build web pages is by using server-side templates. Such templates let you create HTML pages that include special elements that you can fill and modify dynamically. They are easy to understand for designers and easy to maintain for…

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The curse of old Java libraries

Java is known for its backward-compatibility. You can still execute code that was written many years ago, as long as you use an appropriate version of Java. Thanks to this feature, modern projects use a wide range of libraries that have been “tested by time”…

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Bypassing SOP using the browser cache

Misconfigured caching can lead to various vulnerabilities. For example, attackers may use badly-configured intermediate servers (reverse proxies, load balancers, or cache proxies) to gain access to sensitive data. Another way to exploit caching is through Web Cache Poisoning attacks. The browser cache may look like…

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A fresh look on reverse proxy related attacks

In recent years, several researches have been published about attacks deliberately or directly related to reverse proxies. While implementing various reverse-proxy checks on the scanner, I started analyzing implementations of reverse proxies. Initially, I wanted to analyze how both reverse proxies and web servers parse…

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