prevention of an attack vector (e.g. XSS, HPP, CSRF)
43
votes
2answers
5k views
What are rainbow tables and how are they used?
Where can I find one? Is there a pot of gold at the end?
How do I protect against them?
From the Area51 proposal
This question was IT Security Question of the Week.
Read the Sep 09, 2011 blog ...
31
votes
6answers
6k views
What techniques do advanced firewalls use to protect againt DoS/DDoS?
It is hard to protect a server against Denial of Service attacks, DoS/DDoS. The two simple ways I can think of is to use a server with much resources (e.g. CPU and memory), and to build the server ...
17
votes
5answers
846 views
Can you secure a web app from FireSheep without using SSL?
Assume that you want to give some web users privileged access to your website, but that you are unable (or unwilling) to offer SSL to all of them - at least past the initial login page.
In this ...
9
votes
3answers
546 views
What steps should be taken to validate user uploaded images within an application?
Recently I have worked on a number of applications that need to process user uploaded images steps have been taken to validate the extension and the mime type.
But what else can be done to ensure ...
50
votes
13answers
7k views
Why do sites implement locking after 3 failed password attempts?
I know the reasoning behind not letting infinite password attempts -- brute force attempts is not a meatspace weakness, but a problem with computer security -- but where did they get the number 3 ...
19
votes
2answers
2k views
How can a Software application defend against DoS or DDoS?
Most of the solutions for DoS attacks are not at the application level. In case I am using a proxy server, what are the possible countermeasures for DoS at the application level?
16
votes
7answers
604 views
Protecting WordPress installations
How do you go about protecting a default WordPress installation? What checklist do you use, best practices, tips and tricks, etc? Any recommendations on plugins, third-party tools are welcome. Thanks.
...
10
votes
3answers
2k views
How can I prevent someone from accessing a Windows XP system via boot disk?
Apparently a computer system protected by a a login password, e.g. Windows XP, can be easily hacked by someone with physical access to it using methods like this one:
...
11
votes
4answers
4k views
What is the correct way to implement anti-CSRF form tokens?
I am fully aware of CSRF and have already implemented some safe forms, but I have never been happy with the results yet.
I've created tokens as a md5 of username, form info and a salt and stored it ...
19
votes
3answers
976 views
Does overlaying the mouse on a virtual numeric keyboard really protect against keyloggers?
I just saw for the first time a new way to enter a password, at the Banque Postale (French Bank). You are given a virtual numeric keyboard and to type you can just leave the mouse cursor over a number ...
13
votes
3answers
4k views
Is there a way to mitigate BEAST without disabling AES completely?
It seems that the easiest way to protect users against the BEAST attack on TLS <= 1.0 is to prefer RC4 or even disable all other (CBC) cipher suites altogether, e.g. by specifying something like
...
8
votes
2answers
513 views
MIME sniffing protection
As it is known, older versions of MSIE (before 8) have a nasty habit of treating images as HTML if they "look like" HTML, which can lead to nasty vulnerabilities for sites that allow people to upload ...
8
votes
4answers
1k views
QR codes that can't be copied - possible?
I assume this is impossible, but I need to find a barcode (that can contain a url, i.e., a QR style one).
It has to be photographed by our smartphone app, but the image will not be changed over a ...
23
votes
6answers
1k views
Is there a difference between GET and POST for web application security?
I have 2 choices in sending data between 2 web applications.
I encode the data in Base64 and append to the URL and retrieve these parameters at my destination application and decode the parameters.
...
14
votes
8answers
2k views
Any comprehensive solutions for binary code protection and anti-reverse-engineering?
Does anyone know of good products with comprehensive binary hardening and anti-reverse-engineering features? Or better, has anyone seen an independent review comparing products that perform these ...
16
votes
8answers
830 views
Ways to secure yourself from Firesheep kiddies and other sniffing
Just a few days ago I had my first encounter with Firesheep. Luckily I was the one using it. Well, it scared me into looking for ways to secure myself. So I have two questions:
In exactly what ...
16
votes
5answers
918 views
Designing in zero day attack mitigations
What are best practices / recommendations / strategies for mitigating zero day threats/attacks from a software development perspective?
10
votes
5answers
464 views
How to best defend against Targeted Attacks?
We have seen this attack method grow as part of Advanced Persistent Threats (operation Aurora against Google or the G20 French Finance ministry attacks come to mind) but I have no doubt that even ...
5
votes
3answers
397 views
Appropriate defense for 404s in my logs - persistent web scans from one region
This seems to be a fairly easy question to figure out, but I wanted to make sure. I've got about a thousand entries on one of my web servers with phpmyadmin in the connection criterion, but as I ...
6
votes
5answers
2k views
Can I block based on Mac Address?
Incase of dynamic IP's the hacker can work around by taking a new IP or use a Proxy, is it possible to make a ban based on Mac Address ?
I want to block at the Webserver level so that unwanted users ...
5
votes
5answers
2k views
What kind of attacks against home router's NAT do exist?
I always thought NAT was some kind of a security feature and I still think it is, because if it didn't existed the internet, respectively the clients behind NATs, would be even more insecure, since ...
1
vote
2answers
463 views
HTML encoding to protect against XSS
While going through some references about protection against XSS i found that it is a good practice to encode data (entered by users) before using it to generate a dynamic page. I was not able to find ...
15
votes
3answers
928 views
DNS Amplification DDOS attack
During the weekend I made some tests to simulate an DNS Amplification DDOS attack. sending about 90Mb/s traffic I was able to generate about x.x Gb/s amplified traffic which sent our datacenter ...
10
votes
2answers
374 views
Detecting website attack attempts
I am currently trying to implement some recommendations from OWASP AppSensor Project and I'd like to respond to attacker, when he tries to break into my website. Is there any resource ...
7
votes
2answers
186 views
How do you compare risks from your websites, physical perimeter, staff etc
In assigning budget rationally - ie proportionally to the risk in a particular area, how can you calculate the relative risks?
I can think of examples where clients of mine have secured their ...
23
votes
4answers
1k views
Should I change the default SSH port on linux servers?
Is there any advantage in changing the SSH port, I've seen people do that, but I can't seem to find the reason why.
If you have a strong password and/or a certificate, is it useful for anything?
...
19
votes
6answers
308 views
User input data, is filtering enough or should it be parsed?
In a webapplication there could be two approaches to migate XSS attacks. All the input data could be filtered (removing all 'bad' data), or the input could be parsed, tokenized and output with only ...
3
votes
2answers
196 views
FrameBusting script
It is commonly known that loading your site inside a frame on another site, can potentially expose your site to all kinds of ills, and in general is not a good idea if you have any sensitive data to ...
8
votes
3answers
428 views
What is sandboxing?
In security discussions, the topic of sandboxing often comes up. What is application sandboxing? How does it work, and what security vulnerabilities does it prevent?
8
votes
7answers
918 views
Whitelisting DOM elements to defeat XSS
As we know, developers are responsible for correctly escaping/validating data provided by the user before rendering or storing them. However, we must agree that it's relatively easy to forget a single ...
5
votes
4answers
1k views
How effective are reverse proxies as a web application security measure?
How effective are reverse proxies as a web application security device? Which types of threats do they mitigate against and which don't they?
For example are they more effective in preventing ...
9
votes
2answers
2k views
How to address XSS security issues in FCKeditor / CKeditor?
A security report we conducted through an outside company reported XSS vulnerabilities in FCKeditor which we're using in our PHP application.
They pointed out that accessing URLs such as:
...
7
votes
3answers
282 views
Possible to prevent Juice Jacking by only connecting USB pins 1 & 4?
According to this accepted answer, there is no phone on the market today that is immune from "Juice Jacking"*. I think an easy way to mitigate this threat is to have a filter that blocks USB pins 2 ...
7
votes
3answers
345 views
Virtualization as a layer of security for desktop computers?
Given the amount of 3rd party plugins required to browse the web, I've been compelled to virtualize my online habits to gain an additional layer of security.
There is of course some obvious ...
7
votes
4answers
564 views
Gmail account hack prevention and recovery
I am doing a research on how to prevent my gmail account from being hacked and what are the options of claiming it back.
The associated phone number and recovery email can be changed, in fact I ...
6
votes
7answers
534 views
Should I prevent sending of GET requests for urls that are normally operated with POST request?
There is an url that is normally operated using POST requests (i.e. POST request is sent when user submits form). But attacker can form GET request with parameters that are sent in POST request. This ...
4
votes
4answers
347 views
How to prevent attacks against client side validations?
I have a login form where am accepting Mobile Number of the User for login.
When Mobile Number is submitted, am calling a JavaScript to validate the Mobile Number. My client side validations ...
3
votes
3answers
242 views
How to detect & prevent fake emails?
I hope This not same as this one
E-mail can be made to appear like it came from a big organization?
I'm not asking how to protect a brands & and large organizations (Google , yahoo, etc ..), ...
7
votes
2answers
587 views
Interpolique: transparently preventing SQL Injection and XSS with base64 encoding, what happened?
For the keynote at The Next HOPE a couple of years ago, Dan Kaminsky unveiled Interpolique (the talk is really fun btw). The problem he raised was how to defend against injection attacks, including ...
3
votes
2answers
322 views
Is Drupal's filter_xss enough for filtering HTML?
Drupal has filter_xss function. Is it safe to use for filtering arbitrary user HTML input?
If not, what should be used instead when using Drupal 7?
This questuion is a duplicate of Drupal's built-in ...
1
vote
2answers
212 views
What are the risks of a rogue Access Point? What lessons can be learned from the Wifi Pineapple?
I'd like to educate colleagues and peers on rogue access points using the tool "Wifi Pineapple".
What are some specific security-related lessons I could demonstrate? If applicable, what are the ...
0
votes
0answers
107 views
KDD CUP'99 flag feature's trouble with prevension [closed]
In KDD CUP'99 dataset, "flag" feature refers to "normal or error status of the connection",
which should changes as the TCP connection state changes. However in the training dataset it refers to the ...
