Tag: API Attacks
Looking at cloud breaches over the last few years, it’s easy to get the impression that most were easily avoidable events that occurred due to silly misconfigurations, ugly failure modes, or borderline negligent architectures. To put it bluntly, these cloud breaches look stupid. But the people and the organizations designing and running these systems—both the…
Read MoreThe script uses random function and variable names to avoid detection by antivirus engines. It also contains another Base64-encoded payload. The threat actor uses .Net APIs to call the Windows API. For example, the script uses the .NET API to find address of VirtualAlloc function exported by kernel32.dll. It then marshals the shellcode by using…
Read MoreThe F5 2019 State of Application Services Report noted that more than half (53%) of respondents were more confident about protecting applications on premises than in the public cloud (38%). It is normal to be uneasy about cloud security. Security in the cloud is a double-edged sword: it can render traditional security measures impotent, but…
Read MoreThe cloud, like every other technology, was developed to help us do more things faster and more efficiently. It’s a business tool that provides the self-service flexibility of on-demand technological services decoupled from the need to physically deliver hardware and software. Organizations are flocking to leverage this power, but there are nagging questions: Is cloud…
Read MoreIn part 1, we discussed the various definitions of cloud and looked at cloud incidents related to data breaches, such as outages. In this part, we’re taking a close look at major cloud data breach incidents over the past few years. Are the majority of these breaches associated with sophisticated advanced attackers or malicious insiders?…
Read MoreGood or bad, the cloud adoption represents a new pathway for anyone to become a software startup without having to hire operations or infrastructure personnel. Although they can quickly get a minimally viable application up and running, that application may lack both robustness and security measures of more traditional, well-engineered systems. I’m pretty sure that…
Read MoreAttack Types of Top Attacking IP Addresses Many of the IP addresses attacking American systems during the winter of 2019 were involved with abusive port scanning activity. As noted in the Top Target Ports section, Microsoft SMB port 445 was the highest targeted port. We continue to observe high levels of attack traffic pointed toward…
Read MoreThis is the full-spectrum, director’s cut version of the Application Protection Report, untrammeled by petty concerns like brevity or toner prices (for the shorter version, please see our Summary). This report pulls together the various threats, data sources, and patterns in the episodes into a unified line of inquiry that began in early 2019, picking…
Read MoreThe Application Protection Research Series is an ongoing project at F5 Labs that provides an overarching view of the application security landscape. While detailed analyses of specific attacks are critical for defenders to adapt to emerging techniques, it is easy to overemphasize tactics over strategy if those kinds of analyses are the only thing we…
Read MoreThese kinds of incidents make it clear that the development teams behind these applications assumed that APIs were difficult to find. In all likelihood, they were prioritizing both application functionality and development speed over security. In other words, they “just had to get it to work.” This is a practical illustration of our thesis from…
Read More