Attacks on Web Applications

Abstract

Online applications hold sensitive data that is valuable, and hackers strive to identify weaknesses and exploit them in order to steal data, pose as users, or disrupt the application. Web applications are increasingly exposed to dangers and attack vectors that are more advanced. Additionally, theft of private information—such as user credentials or billing information for credit cards—occurs frequently. Attackers initially concentrated on obtaining personal information that was accidentally exposed through poorly built or poorly protected web apps. Insecure design, security misconfiguration, vulnerable and outdated components, identification and authentication failures, etc. are some of the most prominent web application vulnerabilities that will be covered in this chapter. The authors are using countermeasures including fuzz testing, source code review, and encoding approaches to get around these vulnerabilities. As a result, this chapter offers information on the various attacks that website visitors who use web applications encounter.