Tag: Defending Applications
The best practice document from Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) recommends the use of an external user agent (such as a browser) to complete the flow in authorization flow code grant. When a native app wants to access private information, it needs to first get an authorization code. The native app starts its authorization request…
Read MoreCan’t We Just Get Rid of Passwords Now? Shape Security and F5 Labs recently published the 2021 Credential Stuffing Report, which is the product of a multi-year collaborative research project that evolved from Shape’s original Credential Spill Report. This year’s report covers the lifecycle of credential theft in detail, from the original theft of usernames…
Read MoreEven Strong Defenses May Contain Weaknesses One could argue that fraudsters’ tactics are not novel and that investing in specialized products with machine learning and artificial intelligence should solve the issue of fraud. But somehow fraudsters still manage to outsmart security defenses. In a recent discussion that F5 Labs had with the head of the…
Read MoreHeadlines about breaches and compliance penalties give us a strong idea of what we do not want for our security programs. Of the breaches in 2020, the financial sector had the highest percentage at 17 percent, as noted in the 2021 Application Protection Report. With breaches, come regulator attention. In 2017, New York’s Department of…
Read MoreTo find the correct password, attackers must check word after word until they find one which outputs the same hash value as the one they have stolen. While this sounds tedious, password cracking tool, such as Hashcat, are capable of calculating billions of hashes per second on a single computer. Renting cloud computing services allows…
Read MoreThe 2021 Application Protection report notes that ransomware was a factor in roughly 30 percent of U.S. breaches in 2020. Looking at the breach analyses, we found some of the most important controls were user account management, network segmentation, and data backup. We realize that implementing these controls can be difficult, so this article goes…
Read MoreBanking has undergone some huge transformations over the last decade as it becomes more embedded in consumers’ everyday lives. In the last year alone, technology adoption in banking has accelerated at an unprecedented rate due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A testament to this India, where digital payments over the unified payment interface (UPI) increased from…
Read MoreYou also need to restrict administrative access at the application level. This can mean that only certain individuals have administrative privileges in the app, or it can mean that administrators can only access the control surfaces from specific subnets. Data sources for the application, whether internal or external, need to be treated to the same…
Read MoreFraud has become a pervasive part of the discussion around cybersecurity. In part, this reflects a change in attacker motives, as cyber-attacks were not always as vicious as they are now. From the 1980s into the early 2000s, hacking was not really about profit. It was primarily about achieving fame in the hacker community by…
Read MoreIt is in this spirit of collaboration, and with all the respect in the world for the incident responders who have had to deal with Log4Shell, that we want to use this event to reflect a bit on the present and immediate future of security as both an industry and a body of knowledge. In…
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