Welcome Guest. | Log In | Register | Membership Benefits

Websites Are Attacked Once Every Two Minutes

New study show directory traversal, XSS most common attacks, not SQL injection

Jul 25, 2011 | 12:42 PM | 

By Kelly Jackson Higgins
Dark Reading
Websites today get attacked an average of once every two minutes, and upward of seven times per second when the attacks are automated, a new study has found.

Imperva, which released the data in its first biannual "Web Application Attack Report," published today, gathered information from more than 10 million Web application attacks that occurred between December 2010 through May 2011 targeting enterprise and government websites, as well as via TOR. The U.S. leads the world in originating Web application attacks, and 61 percent of these attacks come from bots in the U.S. The botnet command-and-control servers, however, aren't necessarily from the U.S., according to the report.

Rob Rachwald, director of security at Imperva, says attack automation is becoming prevalent as attackers increasingly deploy automated tools to try to break into websites.

Interestingly, the pervasive SQL injection was not the most common attack technique in Web app attacks, even though it's the most publicized. The directory traversal attack -- an exploit where an attacker gets access to restricted directories -- accounted for 37 percent of attacks during the six-month period, followed by cross-site scripting (XSS), with 36 percent of the attacks. Around 23 percent of the attacks were SQL injection ones, and 4 percent were remote-file include attacks.

"RFI and directory traversal attack [numbers] were kind of a surprise," Rachwald says. "This mimics the kinds of attacks we saw from LulzSec."

Rachwald pointed out that the Anonymous spin-off group Lulz Security had exploited thousands of servers using RFI attacks, often using RFI as a first stage and then following up with SQL injection. "I don't think people think about RFI," he says. "RFI and directory traversal don't even appear on the OWASP Top 10. We focus a lot on vulnerabilities in the industry, and this shows how important it is to match that up against actual attack data."

A full copy of the report is available here (PDF) here for download.

Have a comment on this story? Please click "Add Your Comment" below. If you'd like to contact Dark Reading's editors directly, send us a message.



Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dark Reading encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dark Reading moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Dark Reading further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
Subscribe to RSS



Database Security Reports

report Securing The Data Warehouse
Many enterprises are building data warehouses to centralize the ever-increasing information flowing through their organizations into useful repositories. This makes good business sense, but it opens up a slew of concerns from a security standpoint. IT professionals can apply many of the same security best practices used with databases, but there are new lessons to be learned as well.

report Defend Your Data From Malicious Insiders
The biggest threat to your company?s most sensitive data may be the employee who has legitimate access to corporate databases but less-than-legitimate intentions. And while the incidence of insider data breaches has decreased, external attacks often imitate them--and do serious damage. Follow our advice to mitigate the risk.

report Ensuring Secure Database Access
Role-based access control based on least user privilege is one of the most effective ways to prevent the compromise of corporate data. But proper provisioning is a growing challenging, due to the proliferation of "big data," NoSQLdatabases, and cloud-based data storage.

Other reports from the Database Security Tech Center:

Related Content

Establishing a Strategy for Database Security is No Longer Optional
As databases continue to grow in size, complexity and importance, enterprises struggle to identify the most appropriate controls regarding their use and misuse. The report identifies best practices, including: Implementing database activity monitoring to mitigate the high levels of risk from database vulnerabilities, and address audit findings in areas such as database segregation of duties and change management; using data security measures, such as data masking and data encryption; and monitoring privileged-user access and access to critical data.

Database Activity Monitoring Is Evolving Into Database Audit and Protection
In this report, Gartner writes that "Database audit and protection (DAP) represents an evolutionary advance in database activity monitoring tools." DAP suites provide comprehensive, cross-platform support in heterogeneous database environments to protect sensitive data from inappropriate use. Organizations are increasingly concerned with optimizing database security and mitigating risks associated with database vulnerabilities.

Protecting Against Database Attacks and Insider Threats: Top 5 Scenarios
Data security presents a multi-dimensional challenge in today's complex IT environment. Multiple access paths and permission levels have resulted in a broad array of security threats and vulnerabilities. We invite you to read this new eBook: "Protecting against database attacks and insider threats" to learn the top five scenarios and essential best practices for preventing database attacks and insider threats.

Demo: Distributed Database Security with Real-time Monitoring and Audit Protection
Organizations across the globe continue to experience compromised data caused by malicious attacks, web application vulnerabilities or unauthorized changes. View this demo and learn how IBM InfoSphere Guardium? database activity monitoring can help protect your sensitive data in distributed DBMS environments with a holistic approach to data security and compliance.

Look Beyond Native Database Auditing To Improve Security, Audit Visibility, And Real-Time Protection
Today's attacks on enterprise databases are more sophisticated than ever, and they occur so fast that it's often difficult to stop them in real time. Despite significant efforts to protect enterprise databases, the number of records breached has grown each year - due to all types of internal and external attacks and violations of corporate policy.




Featured Webcasts
Featured Whitepapers
Featured Reports