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Research brief

Attacks

  • What are the following types of attack?
    • Man In The Middle (MITM)
    • Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
    • Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
  • How can you defend against each of them?

TEAM ATTACK!!!!

KinRosaAyubGillian

What are web attacks?

  • Attacks that exploit weeknesses or vulnerabilities in code
  • DDoS is a common type of web attack (Labour party cyber systems attacked twice in two days) which aims to disrupt systems by overwhelming the server or network
  • People often use web attacks to gain access to databases in order to obtain sensitive data
  • Web applications have direct access to backend data such as databases, which makes it more difficult to secure them against attacks
  • Firewalls and SSL provide no protection against a web application attack, because access to the website has to be made public. Certain ports are needed and remain open for legitimate access to databases, but this presents a vulnerability
  • SQL Injection attacks (targets databases directly) are the most common and the most dangerous type of vulnerability

Fun stats!

  • there is a hacker attack every 39 seconds
  • half a billion personal record stolen in 2018 - 25% more than the previous year
  • 90% of cybersecurity breaches are due to human error - e.g. clicking on a malicious link, replying to a fake email, leaving laptop on train
  • 95% of breached records are from government, retail, and technology - not because less secure, but they're high value targets with personal information
  • most companies take nearly 6 months to detect a data breach (even major ones) - by the time you're notified that there's a breach, your data is probably already compromised

Man in the Middle

  • the hacker intercepts communication between two parties, or they manage to gain access to their device.
  • In order for this attack to be successful you must interception and decryption.
  • the hacker needs a way of injecting malicious software into the device.
  • the victim isn't aware of the man in the middle

example

  • wifi WiFi eavesdropping.
  • email phishing.
  • Paul and Ann Lupton

how to prevent

  • always check before you use public wifi
  • always be careful of phishing emails
  • use HTTPS because of the extra layer of security.

XSS - Cross Site Scripting

  • Injections 💉
  • Malicious code sent
  • If successful, system will run the malicious code as intended (e.g. script tags as Javascript)
  • Stored attacks: bad script stored on server
    • E.g. posting message

  • Reflected attacks: bad script put in request and reflected straight back in response
    • E.g. search term

Why?

Get personal data e.g. cookies: login data

Manipulate behaviour e.g. redirect unsuspecting users to bad places e.g. phishing sites

Demonstration!

Defences

Encoding against problematic characters like < >

search result:

Make it text!

E.g. put user input into quotation marks (store/write as strings)

![](https://i.imgur.com/pNrJiN0.png =450x200) ![](https://i.imgur.com/STTIRjR.png =450x200)

URLs

Check is valid URL format before using?

Further Reading

This website is very comprehensive!

https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/

(not just for XSS attacks)

Cross browser website forgery: A HOW TO GUIDE

STEP ONE

GET http://netbank.com/transfer.do?acct=AttackerA&amount=$100 HTTP/1.1

STEP TWO (GET)

<a href="http://netbank.com/transfer.do?acct=AttackerA&amount=$100">Read more!</a>

STEP TWO (POST)

   <form action="http://netbank.com/transfer.do" method="POST">
     <input type="hidden" name="acct" value="AttackerA"/>
     <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="$100"/>
     <input type="submit" value="View my pictures!"/>
   </form>
 </body>

How do i defend against it?

Synchroniser token pattern

A token, secret and unique value for each request, is embedded by the web application in all HTML forms and verified on the server side.

The token will then be included as a request parameter when the form is submitted.

<input type="hidden" name="csrfmiddlewaretoken" value="KbyUmhTLMpYj7CD2di7JKP1P3qmLlkPt" />

This token is generated by any method that ensures unpredictability and uniqueness.

Extra reading