What is “OWASP Top 10 Most Critical Web Application Security Risks”: Part 3
Welcome to the concluding part of the series “What is “OWASP Top 10 Most Critical Web Application Security Risks.” Learn more about the vulnerabilities to look out for.
There is a possibility that an application contains untrusted data that has not been appropriately validated on a new page. When attackers see this vulnerability, they can take advantage of it by executing scripts in a victim’s browser and hijack the user’s sessions or forcefully direct visitors to dangerous sites.
However, managers and developers can leverage the efficiency of frameworks like the React JS and Ruby on Rails that emphatically prevent cross-site scripting by design. They can also adopt a content security policy (CSP) to curtail the potential vulnerabilities of XSS. In conclusion, they can integrate techniques that will ensure an escape HTTP request data based on the HTML output into the existing applications.
- INSECURE DESERIALIZATION
Remote code execution is the worst fear about this vulnerability. The weakness can be exploited by the attackers to carry out different types of forms of digital offenses such as privilege escalation attacks and replay attacks.
Insecure deserialization can be avoided by implementing integrity checks like digital signatures on objects that have been serialized. Managers and developers must separate and run a code that monitors, deserializes, and notifies in low privilege environments when any user deserializes continuously.
These days, most applications are bundled with frameworks and libraries that might not function with a similar degrees of privileges with the application. As a result, if a digital attacker discovers a weak and susceptible component and exploits the weakness, they could compromise a vital server or steal sensitive information.
Specific components are merely extraneous for an application; hence, organizations should ensure to remove unnecessary components as a crucial security step. Managers and developers must get components from reliable and original sources and watch out for possible vulnerabilities.
- INSUFFICIENT LOGGING AND MONITORING
An organization must prioritize the logging and monitoring activities on its IT platform. Failure to monitor and regulate these security measures could allow attackers to infiltrate systems, move unnoticed on the network, and steal sensitive data.
Managers and developers must ensure that server-side input validation failures, access control failures, and all login failures are logged with adequate user context to protect the organizations against these vulnerabilities. Furthermore, they must make sure each log is generated in the form that the centralized log management solution can use.
