Tag: TLS Tier

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…

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Ever wonder what security professionals see as their main barrier to achieving a strong application security posture? We wondered that, too, so we asked them. As part of F5 Labs’ first annual Application Protection Report, F5, in conjunction with Ponemon Institute, surveyed security professionals on a slew of security-related topics. In answer to this particular…

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In 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…

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The most common initial vector for phishing attacks is the fraudulent email. A well-crafted phishing email entices the victim to click on a malicious link that then takes them to an attacker’s site. Once that happens, that site must appear to be as authentic as possible. Images, fonts, layout, styles, and even the URL will…

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What is Certificate Transparency? Certificate Transparency (CT) is a method for publicly logging, auditing, and monitoring the creation of new SSL/TLS (digital) certificates. Originally a concept from Google, CT is now an open standard under RFC 6962, albeit still an experimental one. Originally designed to enhance the veracity of Extended Validation (EV) certificates, many certificate…

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In-App Testing Since the HSTS and HPKP protocols allow for genuine interception of SSL by trusted certificates, nothing can be done to warn end users that their communications are being intercepted. For those that need to inform their users of interception, in-app testing could be considered. By performing an additional SSL/TLS handshake, using Javascript within…

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  Web Application Security Our biggest research story of the year was our 2019 Application Protection Series, which focused on looking at an entire year of application-related breaches as well as a year of global web attack traffic. In that story, we noted how PHP vulnerabilities comprise 81% of the attack traffic, much of it…

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Welcome to the Summary of the 2019 F5 Labs TLS Telemetry Report. This year, we expanded the scope of our research to bring you deeper insights into how encryption on the web is constantly evolving. We look into which ciphers and SSL/TLS versions are being used to secure the Internet’s top websites and, for the…

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Mirai is an IoT botnet (or thingbot) that F5 has discussed since 2016. It infamously took down large sections of the Internet in late 2016 and has remained active ever since. Its source code was released online in September 2016, allowing unskilled attackers to create a malicious botnet with relative ease. Mirai continues to target…

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The 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…

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