Find out how IT security professionals can benefit from the free resources available from the OWASP Top 10 2013 List of Risks. As IT security professionals we certainly have our fair share of information available to simplify the work we do. There’s the CVE dictionary,…
OWASP Updated the Top 10 List of Risks for 2013
Last week, the OWASP team officially updated the Top 10 list of risks so as to make it relevant for the web attack vectors identified in the last three years. The OWASP Top Ten summarizes and often combines web application vulnerabilities into an easy to interpret and…
Responding to DoS attacks at the web layer
Are you ready to respond to DoS attacks at the web layer? In this article, Kevin Beaver shares an anecdote from his own experience whilst highlighting some important steps to take. First things first; responding to DoS attacks at the web layer starts with ensuring…
WordPress Caching Plugins Remote PHP Code Execution
Two very popular WordPress caching plugins: WP Super Cache (4,373,811 downloads) and W3 Total Cache (1,975,480 downloads) have been affected by a vulnerability that allows remote users to execute arbitrary PHP code. The affected versions are: WP Super Cache (version 1.2 and below,  version 1.3.x and up are…
WordPress Attack Vectors and Open Amazon S3 Buckets Identified by Invicti WVS
Recently there were a lot of news reports about an ongoing attack on sites using WordPress software. Attackers are using around 90,000 computers to try to brute force WordPress credentials. All these servers are trying common account names like admin, administrator, test, tom, jessica, … and…
New WordPress Checks in Invicti Web Vulnerability Scanner v8 build 20130416
This new release of Invicti Web Vulnerability Scanner version 8, build 20130416, includes new and improved vulnerability checks which target WordPress installations, web applications hosted on Amazon S3, various other web applications. New Functionality Added a test that enumerates valid WordPress usernames using various techniques….
Protect your WordPress from Mass Brute Force Attacks
Last week a sophisticated botnet that targets and launches brute force attacks against WordPress blogs and websites has been detected. Some WordPress hosting providers suffered downtime, security experts are exploiting this opportunity to sell their WordPress security services and thousands of WordPress sites have been…
The Risks Associated with Third-Party Software Components
I was recently contacted by a colleague in an information security leadership position who was concerned about his developers using some third-party plug-ins for an enterprise application they were rolling out. His developers wanted to install these third-party components in order to speed up their…
"Social Media Widget" Adds New Undocumented Feature – Spam Injection
WordPress.com have removed the rather popular Social Medial Widget (nearly a million downloads) from the plugin repository. The most recent version of the plugin was found to be injecting spam messages with the social media icons on the sites using the plugin. It seems that…