The Internet continues to grow at an incredible pace, with more archives of valuable information are being placed online than ever before. A significant amount of those archives distributed online is extremely valuable, including credit card details, crypto-currency, intellectual property, personal details, and trade secrets.
Businesses, governments, and consumers are also more reliant on the Internet for their daily activities. The transactions performed online are worth billions of dollars and trillions of archives of information is exchanged online every day.
The lucrative nature of the Internet has led to a significant increase in the number of Cyber-Attack from Cyber-Thieves. These Cyber-Thieves may employ various tools and techniques to gain access to the sensitive information that is found online. They often compromise the websites and network resources in an effort to extort money or steal assets from organizations.
To protect yourself and your business against Cyber-Thieves, it is important to be aware of how website compromising technique works. This guide will share the most common Cyber-Attack, to help you prepare for most types of malicious threats.
SQL Injection Cyber-Attack is the most common website compromising technique. Most websites employ Structured Query Language (SQL) to interact with archives. SQL allows the website to create, retrieve, update, and delete records from the archives. It is normally employed for everything from logging the authorized client into the website to storing details of an e-commerce transaction.
An SQL injection Cyber-Attack places SQL into a web form in an attempt to get the application to run it. For example, instead of typing plain text into the field of login credentials, a Cyber-Thief may type in ‘ OR 1=1.
If the application appends this string directly to an SQL command that is designed to check if the authorized client exists in the archives, it will always return true. This can allow these Cyber-Thieves to gain access to a restricted section of a website. Other SQL injection Cyber-Attack can be employed to delete information from the archives or document new information.
Cyber-Thieves sometimes employ automated tools to perform SQL injections on remote websites. They will scan thousands of websites, testing many types of injection Cyber-Attack until they are successful.
SQL injection Cyber-Attack can be prevented by correctly filtering input from the authorized client. Most programming languages have special functions to safely handle the input or requests sent by the authorized client.
Cross-Site Scripting is a major vulnerability that is often exploited by Cyber-Thieves to compromise a website. It is one of the more difficult vulnerabilities to deal with because of the way it works. Some of the largest websites in the world have dealt with successful XSS Cyber-Attack including Microsoft and Google.
Most XSS website compromising cyber-attacks employ malicious Java-script, those scripts are embedded in hyperlinks. When the authorized client clicks the link, it might steal personal information, hijack a web session, take over client’s account, or change the advertisements that are being displayed on a page.
Cyber-Thieves will often insert these malicious links into web forums, social media websites, and other prominent locations where authorized clients will click them. To avoid XSS Cyber-Attack, website owners must filter input received by authorized clients to remove any malicious code.
The denial of service is the latest technique used by Cyber-Thieves, in which they overwhelm a website with an immense amount of fake Internet traffic created employing several bots and this ultimately causes the servers to become overloaded with a huge amount of requests, which results in a server crash. Most DDoS Cyber-Attack are carried out using Digital-Systems that have been compromised with malware. The owners of the infected Digital-System may not even be aware that their machine is sending requests to access the archives of their website.
Denial of service Cyber-Attack can be prevented by:
Rate limiting your web server’s router
Adding filters to your router to drop packets from dubious sources
Dropping spoofed or malformed packets
Setting more aggressive timeouts on connections
Using firewalls with DDoS protection
Using third-party DDoS mitigation program from Akamai, Cloudflare, VeriSign, Arbor Networks or another provider
Cross-site request forgery is a very common technique employed by Cyber-Thieves to exploit vulnerabilities of websites. It occurs when unauthorized commands are transmitted from a client that a web application trusts. The client is usually logged into the website, so they have a higher level of privileges, allowing the Cyber-Thief to transfer funds, obtain account information or gain access to sensitive information.
There are many ways for Cyber-Thieves to transmit forged commands including hidden forms, AJAX, and image tags. The authorized client is not aware that the command has been sent and the website believes that the command has come from an authorized client. The main difference between an XSS and CSRF Cyber-Attack is that the client should be logged in and trusted by a website for a CSRF website compromising Cyber-Attack to work. Website owners can prevent CSRF Cyber-Attack by checking HTTP headers to verify where the request is coming from and check CSRF tokens in web forms. This type of diagnosis will make sure that the request has come from the internal page of a web application and not from an unknown external source.
This attacking technique injects a corrupt domain system archive into a DNS resolver’s cache to redirect where a website’s traffic is sent. It often employs the way of sending traffic from legitimate websites to malicious websites that contain malware. DNS spoofing can also be employed to gather information about the traffic being diverted. The best technique for preventing DNS spoofing is to set short TTL times and regularly clear the DNS caches of local machines.
In some cases, the greatest weakness in a website’s security system is the people that operate it. Social engineering seeks to exploit this weakness. The Cyber-Thieves will convince a website administrator to divulge some important information that helps them exploit the website. There are many forms of social engineered Cyber-Attacks, including:
Phishing
The authorized clients of a website are sent fraudulent emails that look like they have come from the website, then the client is asked to divulge some information, such as their login details or personal information. Cyber-Thieves can employ this information to compromises the website.
Baiting
This is a classic social engineering technique was first employed in the 1970s. The Cyber-Thief will leave a device near your place of business, perhaps marked with a label like “employee salaries”. One of your employees might pick it up and insert it into their Digital-System out of curiosity. The USB stick will contain malware that infects your Digital-System’s network and compromises your website.
Pretexting
The Cyber-Thief will contact you, one of your customers or an employee and pretend to be someone else. They will demand sensitive information, which they employ to compromise your website. The best way to eliminate social engineered Cyber-Attack is to educate your employees and customers about these kinds of threats.
In many cases, Cyber-Thieves won’t specifically target your website. Instead of your website, they will be more focused on exploring vulnerabilities present in your plugin, content management system or templates.
For example, they may have developed an attacking technique that targets a vulnerability in a particular version of Word-Press, Joomla, or another content management system. They will employ automated bots to find websites using this version of the content management system in question before launching a Cyber-Attack. They might employ the vulnerability to delete stored archives from your website, steal sensitive information, or to insert malicious program onto your server.
The best way to avoid website compromising Cyber-Attacks to ensure your content management system, plugins, and templates are all up-to-date.
