How Can We Block Common Web Attacks And Protect Our Website Security.
Providing Transport Layer Protection with SSL/TLS.
The primary benefit of transport layer security is the protection of web application data from unauthorized disclosure and modification when it is transmitted between clients (web browsers) and the web application server, and between the web application server and back end and other non-browser based enterprise components.
Also See – How To Become a Web Pentester and Reverse Engineer?
The server validation component of TLS provides authentication of the server to the client. If configured to require client side certificates, TLS can also play a role in client authentication to the server. However, in practice client side certificates are not often used in lieu of username and password based authentication models for clients.
TLS also provides two additional benefits that are commonly overlooked; integrity guarantees and replay prevention. A TLS stream of communication contains built-in controls to prevent tampering with any portion of the encrypted data. In addition, controls are also built-in to prevent a captured stream of TLS data from being replayed at a later time.
It should be noted that TLS provides the above guarantees to data during transmission. TLS does not offer any of these security benefits to data that is at rest. Therefore appropriate security controls must be added to protect data while at rest within the application or within data stores.
Use TLS, as SSL is no longer considered usable for security
- All pages must be served over HTTPS. This includes css, scripts, images, AJAX requests, POST data and third party includes. Failure to do so creates a vector for man-in-the-middle attacks.
- Just protecting authenticated pages with HTTPS, is not enough. Once there is one request in HTTP, man-in-the-middle attacks are possible, with the attackers being able to prevent users from reaching the secured pages.
- The HTTP Strict Transport Security Header must be used and pre loaded into browsers. This will instruct compatible browsers to only use HTTPS, even if requested to use HTTP.
- Cookies must be marked as Secure.
There are three types of vulnerabilities that must be secured for website security.
A: SQL Injection
–>Types
Login Form Bypassing
UNION SQL Injection
Also See- SQL Injection Testing Using SQLMAP
B: Cross Site Scripting
–> Cross Site Request Forgery
Also See- What is Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Attack?
C: File Inclusion
Types-> Remote File Inclusion and Remote Code Execution
On this post i am telling about five types of common web attacks, which are used in most types of defacements or dumps of databases.
The five exploits listed above are SQL injection, XSS, RCE, RFI, and LFI. Most of the time, we missed out some website security code tags.
coz of this we get website attacks and allows the hacker for attack on vulnerable website.
Also Read-
A: SQL Injection
–> LOGIN FORM BYPASSING
Here is an example of the vulnerable code that we can bypass very easily:
index.html file:
<form action="login.php" method="POST" />
<p>Password: <input type="text" name="pass" /><br />
<input type="submit" value="Authenticate" /></p>
</form>
login.php file:
<?php
// EXAMPLE CODE
$execute = "SELECT * from database WHERE password = '{$_POST['pass'])";
$result = mysql_query($execute);
?>
We can simply bypass this by using ‘ or ‘1=1’, which will execute “password = ”or ‘1=1”;”.
Alternatively, the user can also delete the database by executing “‘ drop table database; –“.
PREVENTION:
Use mysql_real_escape_string in your php code.
Example:
<?php $badword = "' OR 1 '"; $badword = mysql_real_escape_string($badword); $message = "SELECT * from database WHERE password = "'$badword'"; echo "Blocked " . $message . "; ?>
–> UNION SQL Injection
UNION SQL injection is when the user uses the UNION command. The user checks for the vulnerability by adding a tick to the end of a “.php?id=” file. If it comes back with a MySQL error, the site is most likely vulnerable to UNION SQL injection. They proceed to use ORDER BY to find the columns, and at the end, they use the UNION ALL SELECT command. An example is shown below.
http://www.site.com/website.php?id=1'
You have an error in your SQL syntax near ” at line 1 SELECT SUM(quantity)
as type FROM orders where (status=’completed’ OR status=’confirmed’ OR status=’pending’) AND user_id=1′
No error--> http://www.site.com/website.php?id=1 ORDER BY 1--
Two columns, and it comes back with an error! This means that there is one column.
http://www.site.com/website.php?id=1 ORDER BY 2--
Selects the all the columns and executes the version() command on the only column.
http://www.site.com/website.php?id=-1 UNION SELECT ALL version()--
SOLUTION:
Add something like below to prevent UNION SQL injection.
$evil = "(delete)|(update)|(union)|(insert)|(drop)|(http)|(--)|(/*)|(select)"; $patch = eregi_replace($evil, "", $patch);
B: Cross Site Scripting
Cross site scripting is a type of vulnerability used by hackers to inject code into vulnerable web pages.
If a site is vulnerable to cross site scripting, most likely users will try to inject the site with malicious javascript or try to scam users by creating a form where users have to type their information in.
Two types of XSS (cross site scripting) are persistent XSS and non-persistent XSS.
Example: http://www.site.com/search.php?q=">
SOLUTION
(javascript) (Thank you, Microsoft!):
function RemoveBad(strTemp) {
strTemp = strTemp.replace(/\<|\>|\"|\'|\%|\;|\(|\)|\&|\+|\-/g,"");
return strTemp;
}
C: File Inclusion
Types: Remote File Inclusion/Local File Inclusion, and Remote Code Execution
Remote File Inclusion allows a hacker to include a remote file through a script (usually PHP). This code is mostly patched on websites, but some websites are still vulnerable to the vulnerability. RFI usually leads to remote code execution or javascript execution.
Example of the vulnerable code:
<
Exploiting it would be something like this:
http://www.site.com/page.php?page=../../../../../etc/passwd or http://www.site.com/page.php?page=http://www.site.com/xyz.txt?
SOLUTION:
Validate the input.
$page = $_GET['page'];
$allowed = array('index.php', 'games.php' 'ip.php');
$iplogger = ('ip.php');
if (in_array $page, $pages)) {
include $page {
else
{
include $iplogger
die("IP logged.");
}
For remote code execution, the site would have to have a php executing command. You would patch this by about doing the same thing.
Note: Hope this post will helpful for website security from these types of attacks.