Tag: Dictionary attacks
Executive Summary Like coral reefs teeming with a variety of life, web applications are “colony creatures.” They consist of a multitude of independent components, running in separate environments with different operational requirements and supporting infrastructure (both in the cloud and on premises) glued together across networks. In this report, we examine that series of interacting…
Read MoreIn July 2018, F5 released its first annual Application Protection Report based on the results of an F5-commissioned Ponemon survey of 3,135 IT and security practitioners across the globe. Additional research conducted by Whatcom Community College, University of Washington Tacoma, along with data from White Hat Security and Loryka served to make this one of…
Read MoreAdvanced Attackers Like criminal actors, state-sponsored actors or APTs often initiate their illicit access campaigns with spear phishing. However, advanced actors have more time and resources on their hands, and can fashion something of value even from apparently useless data. Large caches of innocuous information, such as email addresses, can be used to look for…
Read MoreIn 2018 we published our first Application Protection Report, which summarized trends and attack patterns for 2017 across multiple disciplines of information security and offered a big picture strategy for controlling application risk. We created that report in order to provide three things that we felt the security industry needs: a specific focus on application…
Read MoreAPI Vulnerability Data The sensor network that our partner Lorkya maintains found only 0.1% of attack traffic was definitively looking for API vulnerabilities. However, this is probably better attributed to the limitations of the sensor network than any trends about API attacks. Loryka’s sensors primarily detect wide-ranging probes and reconnaissance campaigns where attackers are looking…
Read MoreThe US Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (DHS CISA) has cited ransomware as “the most visible cybersecurity risk” attacking American IT systems. I think that’s a valid statement, since “most visible” doesn’t necessarily mean largest or most devastating, but it does still qualify ransomware as a significant threat. Indeed, it seems…
Read MoreWhat Does a Typical Brute Force Attack Look Like at a Service Provider? Brute force attack methods vary. It’s not uncommon, for example, for mobile phone service providers to encounter unauthorized online account activity in which an attacker accesses accounts by trying a phone number in combination with a PIN code. These types of attacks…
Read MoreAuthentication Attacks: Growing Every Year Credential stuffing and brute force attacks have been the biggest threats for financial services recently, and the trend shows no sign of slowing. This is unsurprising, given the capability that legitimate credentials represent for attackers. If attackers are able to guess or simply re-use already compromised credentials and gain access…
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…
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