Website Security

Web application security

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Web application security is a branch of Information Security that deals specifically with security of websites, web applications and web services.

At a high level, Web application security draws on the principles of application security but applies them specifically to Internet and Web systems. Typically web applications are developed using programming languages such as PHP, Java EE, Java, Python, Ruby, ASP.NET, C#, VB.NET or Classic ASP. 

Security threats

With the emergence of Web 2.0, increased information sharing through social networking and increasing business adoption of the Web as a means of doing business and delivering service, websites are often attacked directly. Hackers either seek to compromise the corporate network or the end-users accessing the website by subjecting them to drive-by downloading.

As a result, industry is paying increased attention to the security of the web applications themselves in addition to the security of the underlying computer network and operating systems.

The majority of web application attacks occur through cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection attacks which typically result from flawed coding, and failure to sanitize input to and output from the web application. These are ranked in the 2009 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors.

Phishing is another common threat to the Web application and global losses from this type of attack in 2012 were estimated at $1.5 billion.

According the security vendor Cenzic, the top vulnerabilities in March 2012 include:

37%     Cross-site scripting
16%     SQL injection
5%     Path disclosure
5%     Denial-of-service attack
4%     Arbitrary code execution
4%     Memory corruption
4%     Cross-site request forgery
3%     Data breach (information disclosure)
3%     Arbitrary file inclusion
2%     Local file inclusion
1%     Remote file inclusion
1%     Buffer overflow
15%     Other, including code injection (PHP/JavaScript), etc.

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