Friday, July 22, 2011

APWG Survey and deja vu all over again

As a participant in the APWG IPC, and a contributing researcher, I was pleased to see Dave Piscitello's APWG Web Vulnerabilities Survey Results and Analysis get some press coverage as it went live in mid-June.
Rather than focus on the survey results (you can read those for yourself), I'd like to focus briefly on mitigation and concerns.
The Results and Analysis-compiled responses "suggest that web sites would benefit from broader implementation of preventative measures to mitigate known vulnerabilities and also from monitoring for anomalous behavior or suspicious traffic patterns that may indicate previously unseen or zero day attacks."
Given the broad scope of CMS platforms, forums, galleries, wikis, shopping carts, and others riding on top of the popular LAMP stack, the absence of such preventative measures and monitoring make for hacker nirvana.
Consider the problems shared servers introduce where vulnerabilities in any of the above-mentioned applications preloaded for on demand end-user deployment via cPanel (not to mention cPanel vulnerabilities) can lead to "game over."
Clearly there are challenges: resources, level of commitment to security by site operators, and hosting provider scrutiny to mention a few.
The problem is not new.
When pending Black Hat presentations are describing tools sets such as Diggity "that speed the process of finding security vulnerabilities via Google or Bing", or Embedded Web Servers Exposing Organizations To Attack, you know it's Groundhog Day. Great tool set (Diggity), but that we're still unfortunately talking about the ease with which hacker groups are finding "opportunities" is troubling to say the least.
When #3 on Kelly Jackson Higgins' list of suggestions to repel attackers states "eliminate SQL injection, XSS, other common website flaws" it's deja vu all over again.
The APWG Web Vulnerabilities Survey asked "What actions did you take to stop the attack?" Compiled answers resulted in data such as:
We patched or updated vulnerable software packages 21%
We had our developers fix our custom software 8%

While other results lean heavily towards security misconfiguration issues, there are still clear opportunities to improve SDL/SDLC practices.
As the survey report indicates, "This article barely scratches the surface of the intelligence the APWG IPC has accumulated from the Web Vulnerability Survey. A complete analysis of the survey results—with specific recommendations, remedies, and practices."
I'm in the midst of research focusing on the scanning and misconfiguration elements of Internet Background Radiation (IBR) using a variety of Web logs. This research still points back to the above mentioned problem space and suggestions, but will drive deeper into attacker and victim trends and traits. This work, coupled with earlier web application security research will feed the analysis paper pending publication by the APWG IPC.
My hope is to also present the IBR work at an upcoming security conference along with a paper or article.
Stay tuned.

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