How to Fix the Top Five Cyber Security Vulnerabilities. A few weeks ago, we analyzed the top five cyber security vulnerabilities in terms of potential for catastrophic damage. Distributing malware inside Adobe PDF documents is a popular method for attackers to compromise systems. Within the latest versions of Reader, Adobe has added. Learn about Accentures latest acquisition, iDefense Security Intelligence. A few weeks ago, we analyzed the top five cyber security vulnerabilities in terms of potential for catastrophic damage. Data breaches like the one affecting the. Data breaches like the one affecting the Federal Office of Personnel Management OPM and the numerous cyber attacks targeting US infrastructure and government offices raise the discussion of the potential catastrophic damage caused by the exploitation of cyber security vulnerabilities. Lets examine in detail the top five cyber security vulnerabilities that we have identified to provide a few suggestions to mitigate the risk for a cyber attack. Injection vulnerabilities. Injection vulnerabilities occur every time an application sends untrusted data to an interpreter. The casuistry of injection flaws is wide, but most popular injection vulnerabilities affect SQL, LDAP, XPath, XML parsers and program arguments. The adoption of best coding practices and design patterns could allow developers to design robust solutions and easily discover such flaws by reviewing the code. Unfortunately, once vulnerable applications are deployed, it is hard to discover injection flaws while testing them. Attackers used to exploit injection flaws to steal data and compromise the target system, in some cases gaining the full control of its resources. It is easy to understand the potential impact for the exploitation of an Injection flaws. As explained by the OSWAP organization, the prevention of injection flaws has to be addressed in the coding phase. The organization suggests keeping untrusted data separate from commands and queries. It is suggested that the adoption of safe API, which provides a parameterized interface and carefully validated input data. In case a parameterized API is not available, coders should carefully escape special characters using the specific escape syntax for that interpreter. In some cases, developers could adopt white list input validation, but despite that, it is a good practice to implement. Buffer Overflow Attacks Pdf To JpgIt doesnt provide a complete defense against injection attacks because many applications require special characters during input. What Is Webarchive File there. SQL Injection vulnerabilities are the most common flaws exploited in injection attacks. The attackers operate by providing input data to a web application that is then used in SQL queries. The data in the majority of cases comes from an untrusted input such as a web form, but it is a good practice to consider not trusted data and also data provided by the database. A common error made by developers is to trust data from their own database. However, there are several ways to poison these data and trigger a SQL injection vulnerability by using data in input extracted from the database. For the validation process, it is important to assume that not all data is created explicitly in the PHP source code of the current request should be considered untrusted. Some languages such as the PHP implement extension that could be used to escape all data that have to be passed to a SQL query. Always referring the SLQ injection mitigation, parameterized queries, also known as prepared Statements, could help developers to avoid the construction of bogus SQL queries. Another good approach consists to enforce the Least Privilege Principle ensuring that users are given only those privileges that are absolutely necessary to carry out their tasks. Users should never access the database from a web application as root or administrator to avoid the ability to gain complete control of the database and exploit other SQL injection attacks for other illicit activities. Buffer Overflows. A buffer overflow vulnerability condition exists when an application attempts to put more data in a buffer than it can hold. Hackers exploit buffer overflow vulnerabilities to overwrite the content of adjacent memory blocks causing data corruption, crash the program, or the execution of an arbitrary malicious code. This kind of attack is difficult to exploit because requests the knowledge of memory management of the targeted software, the buffers it uses, and the way to access them to overwrite their content and run the attack. Buffer Overflow Attacks Pdf To ExcelIn a classic attack scenario, the attacker sends data to an application that store it in an undersized stack buffer, causing the overwriting of information on the call stack, including the functions return pointer. In this way, the attacker is able to run its own malicious code once a legitimate function is completed and the control is transferred to the exploit code contained in the attackers data. There are numerous techniques to prevent buffer overflow attacks, most popular ones are Bounds Checking, which consist of detecting whether avariable is within some bounds before it is used. Buffer Overflow Attacks Pdf' title='Buffer Overflow Attacks Pdf' />There are a number of controls that is possible to perform on the variable, for example, a variable that is being used as an array index is within the bounds of the array index checking. The main problems related to bound checking is the overhead introduced by the controls, to improve code performance developers usually do not perform the checks at any usage. Using of Safe Libraries that help preventing buffer overflows by replacing the legitimate vulnerable function to implement bounds checked replacements to standard memory and string functions. Running Static Code Analysis that is an essential part of the code review. The choice of proper Static Code Analysis tools is crucial to run automatic tests searching for buffer overflow bugs. Using the Executable space protection, a practice that consists in the marking of memory areas where application cannot store executable code. Every time a user or a program attempts to execute machine code in these regions will trigger an exception, in this way it is possible to mitigate buffer overflow making impossible to overwrite the content of these areas. Using canary values. For compile time protection, some compilers calculate the key hash of return pointer when the RP is being pushed onto the stack. This keyed hash value is known as the canary. Then the canary and RP is pushed onto the stack and when the function needs to return, system checks whether the RP and canary has the same value. If they do not, program never return from function not allowing the execution of malicious code and causing the program end gracefully. Implementing the Address space layout randomization ASLR, a technique that randomly arranges the address space positions of principal data areas used by a process. The techniques randomly arrange the address space of executables and the positions of the stack, heap and libraries. Alter Ego 1 French Pdf. Implementing Stack smashing Protection SSP, a compiler feature that helps detecting stack buffer overrun by aborting if specific value, also dubbed stack canary, on the stack is modified. Be aware, SSP simply detects stack buffer overruns, but not prevent them. Sensitive Data Exposure. Sensitive data exposure occurs every time a threat actor gains access to the user sensitive data. Data could be stolen in numerous ways, by hacking data storage, by intercepting data between a server and the browser with a Man In The Middle attack. The principal causes for data exposure are the lack of encryption for sensitive data or the poorly configured encryption processes. The adoption of weak key generation, the lack of proper key management, and the usage of weak algorithms are very common errors in almost every industries and applications.