Tag: Application Protection
Viewed in this way, our research illuminates some interesting aspects of the current state of security. In 2018, to the extent that new attack techniques and approaches emerged, it was largely in response to changes in how organizations design, create, and manage applications. The context that makes old attack techniques like injection and phishing newly…
Read MoreFrom tech giants and gamers to politicians and retailers, nobody is safe from today’s mutating threat landscape. 2019 was another frenzied maelstrom of cyberattacks, mitigations, pre-emptions and preventions, with the old (phishing and DDoS et al) rubbing havoc-wreaking shoulders with the new (new vistas in cyberwars, automation and AI). As ever, continuous pressure also begets…
Read MoreBlack Friday, Cyber Monday and the seasonal ecommerce feeding frenzy are always big news. Hyperactive online activity and potentially compromised purchasing, promotion and sales behaviours are like a red rag to a bull for enterprising cybercriminals. From denial of service (DoS) attacks shutting down retailers in their revenue-generating prime to ransomware campaigns extorting your hard-earned…
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 MoreExecutive Summary Phishing remains a popular method of stealing credentials, committing fraud, and distributing malware. But what appears on the surface to be a juvenile form of cybercrime can be, in practice, a well-orchestrated, multi-faceted, and sustained attack campaign by organized crime groups. From finding victims and creating phishing sites to harvesting and fraudulently using…
Read MoreIdentifying Trends in Recent Cyberattacks Web attacks vary quite a lot—by target, technique, objective, and attacker—which makes it difficult for a system owner to assess the instantaneous risk to their particular combination of systems until they’re attacked. To help defenders anticipate the risks they face, we analyzed several months’ worth of global honeypot traffic from…
Read MoreAccounting for the slight dip in 2019, password login attacks account for 32% of all reported SIRT incidents over the past three years. We also saw how they jumped in 2020, so we did a deeper dive into how these kinds of cyberattacks ramped up during the pandemic. Credential Stuffing Attacks at Financial Services Organizations…
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APIs and Sectors As more APIs are published, both by large enterprises who want to make their data more available (such as Google) and by smaller, industry-specific organizations hoping to generate value, some interesting industry patterns are also emerging. Of the organizations for which we had sector information, social networking organizations made up the largest…
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