Like chemists, carpenters and doctors, those of us working in IT need good tools if we’re expected to do a good job. When dealing with application security, good security testing tools will always set the professionals apart from the amateurs. In fact, the quality of…
Why You Need Intruder Lockout
It’s a very predictable web security flaw — in fact, it’s something I find in the majority of my web security assessments: the lack of intruder lockout on login pages. I know, with all the SQL injection and cross-site scripting present on the web, the…
Don’t Forget Your Marketing Website Security
I recently read about a marketing agency that experienced a security breach and subsequent defacement of its customers’ websites. Apparently their developers had misconfigured the web server and unknowingly gave the whole world access to change any and all content at will. What interested me…
Why people violate security policies
Many organizations have a formal set of information security policies covering everything from acceptable internet usage to security in software development to web application security. In fact, it’s hard to come across a business today that doesn’t have at least a policy or two in…
Not All Web Vulnerability Scans Are Created Equal
Recently a client of mine sent over the results of a web vulnerability scan that one of their customers had run against their production web environment. My client was curious why the results of this third-party scan were different from my findings just a few…
Common Website Security Flaws and What They Mean
Having a successful online presence is hard enough. Throwing some website security-related terms into the mix makes it all the more difficult, especially if you’re not a technical person or computer security guru. Although some folks in IT intentionally make web vulnerabilities difficult to understand…
VIDEO: How Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Works
XSS vulnerabilities (Cross-Site Scripting vulnerabilities) are often overshadowed by their big cousin, the infamous SQL Injection. This does not make them any less effective or deadly. XSS and SQL Injection attacks are similar in the way they inject malicious code. The difference is that an…
Improving Web Security by Working With What You’ve Got
As I wrote about in a previous post, we’re in the era of cutting back – if not completely eliminating – all non-essential expenditures. The thing is what may seem to be non-essential to management may actually be essential to the business. There could just be…
Explaining the “why” of Web application security
Looking at the bigger picture of application security it seems that no one else really hears us. Sure, product managers, marketing, legal, HR and even certain people in management say they understand what’s at stake. But are they really on board? Business leaders have learned…