Do you ever get the feeling that something’s not quite right after you’ve performed an otherwise solid web security assessment? Well, as many of us have discovered, that nagging feeling in the pit of your stomach could be something as simple as not disabling the…
Web Security Tip of the Week: Why Do Hacker Attacks Happen?
Criminal hackers have it made. They know that many people don’t get – or completely ignore – online security. This attitude from many is at the core of why we experience website security issues. But, as problematic as the human factor can be, the real…
htaccess files should not be used for security restrictions
According to Apache documentation: .htaccess files (or “distributed configuration files”) provide a way to make configuration changes on a per-directory basis. A file, containing one or more configuration directives, is placed in a particular document directory, and the directives apply to that directory, and all subdirectories…
What if We Held Ourselves to the Security Certification Standards?
Confidentiality, compensating controls, risk transference are just a few of the core information security concepts covered by the CISSP exam – concepts that also happen to impact Web application security. Having recently completed the technical edits for a CISSP exam prep book, these principles are…
Take Care Handling the Results of Web Application Testing
How do you handle your web application testing, vulnerability scans, test data and related security assessment reports? I’ve found that this is something that doesn’t get a lot of attention in web application security circles but is still impactful to the business. It’s actually kind of ironic that…
Web Security Tip of the Week: Understanding WordPress Vulnerabilities
Did you know that if a system has an IP address or a URL, then it’s fair game for attack from a hacker? That’s been the universal law and it always will be. So why is it that WordPress security and WordPress vulnerabilities seem to…
Don’t Let Problems Stop You From Carrying Out Web Application Testing
Web security assessment success is directly related to the amount of preparation you do up front before you run a single web application test. It’s the 80/20 Rule: the 20 percent time and effort you put into planning for the assessment will represent 80 percent of the value…
The Consequences of Having a Hacked Website
Cybercrimes are at an all time high, with hackers and identity thieves making a living from selling private or corporate data. If you have a hacked website, it can have far reaching repercussions especially if your website databases include your customers’ private and confidential information,…
Windows Short (8.3) Filenames – A Security Nightmare?
Each time you create a new file on Windows, the operating system also generates an MS-DOS-compatible short file name in 8.3 format, to allow MS-DOS-based or 16-bit Windows-based programs to access files which have a long name. You can see these MS-DOS-compatible short file names by…