When creating a password protected section for a website, such as an admin portal for a CMS solution, typically developers check if the user session is authenticated. If the user session is not authenticated, the user is redirect to the login page. Maybe because the lack of…
How Aware Do We Have to be Not to Fall for the Bad Guys Antics?
Criminal hackers are getting more and more creative in their phishing and social engineering attacks on the web. This not only puts your website in the crosshairs but also your own personal information. A common question that comes up is: How do I stay in…
What’s the Best Way to Find Web Security Flaws?
With all of the potential ways the bad guys can exploit websites (literally thousands), many people want to know what the best way is to actually uncover these flaws. Well, there’s no magic bullet answer, however, generally speaking Web flaws can be discovered in one…
Should you Test Development, Staging or Production?
You’ve heard me say that planning is half the battle with Web security assessments. I’m finding that more and more people are on board with thinking things through in advance but there’s still one area that’s not getting the attention it deserves. It’s deciding on…
Why Web Security is Not Just IT’s Problem
What’s your take on Web security? Do you see it as one of those techie things that other people should be handling? Or do you see it as your responsibility to ensure everything associated with your Web presence is in check? Well, according to a…
The Lost Art of Disabling Our Web Security Testing Accounts
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…