Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF/XSRF), also sometimes called sea surf or session riding, refers to an attack against authenticated web applications using cookies. The attacker is able to trick the victim into making a request that the victim did not intend to make. Therefore, the attacker…
Does YouTube Ban Hacking Videos?
A wave of dissatisfaction with Google’s YouTube policies has recently spread around the ethical hacking community. On July 2, Kody Kinzie who runs the Null Byte channel on YouTube reported that he was denied the right to upload a new security video. This was because…
What is the High Orbit Ion Cannon
The High Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC) is an open source network stress testing application available on Sourceforge.net. It is most often used by hacktivists as an attack tool for denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. It is the successor of…
DoH: Mozilla, Cloudflare, and Google vs. the World
Three Internet giants: Mozilla, Google, and Cloudflare, are taking steps towards securing the DNS protocol for browser users. However, the DoH (DNS over HTTPS) standard will make it difficult to supervise the domains that users connect to. This causes increasing controversies, especially in the United…
Clickjacking – What Is It and How To Defend Yourself
In a clickjacking attack, the user is tricked into interacting with a UI element that they do not see. The attacker designs a malicious page with carefully positioned visual elements. The user is lured into clicking on these elements but, in reality, unknowingly clicks on…
New build improves auto-login, detection of DOM XSS, WAFS, CDNs, and reverse proxies
Acunetix version 12 (build 12.0.190703137) has been released. This new build includes a number of updates including a big improvement to Auto-Login, improved detection of DOM XSS, and improved crawling of Spring-based web applications. In addition, a number of vulnerability checks have been reviewed with…
Billions of IoT User Records Leaked via an Unprotected Database
ORVIBO, a Chinese manufacturer of smart home devices, left an unprotected Elasticsearch database accessible online through a web interface with no authentication. The database contained more than 2 billion user records representing more than a million users of ORVIBO smart home devices worldwide. The database…
Insecure Default Password Hashing in CMSs
Christoforos Ntantogian, Stefanos Malliaros, and Christos Xenakis from the Department of Digital Systems in the University of Piraeus (Greece) conducted research on password hashing in open-source web platforms including the most popular content management systems (CMS) and web application frameworks. The results published in their…
What Is OS Command Injection
OS command injection (operating system command injection or simply command injection) is a type of an injection vulnerability. The payload injected by the attacker is executed as operating system commands. OS command injection attacks are possible only if the web application code includes operating system…