Tag: Web Application Attacks

Attack 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…

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F5 Labs, in conjunction with our partner Baffin Bay Networks, researches global attack traffic region to region to gain a deeper understanding of the cyberthreat landscape. Aside from attack campaigns targeting the entire Internet (IPv4 address space), the attack landscape varies regionally in terms of sources, targets, and attack types. In addition, targeted ports expose…

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F5 Labs, in conjunction with our partner Baffin Bay Networks, researches global attack traffic region to region to gain a deeper understanding of the cyberthreat landscape. Aside from attack campaigns targeting the entire Internet (IPv4 address space), the attack landscape varies regionally in terms of sources, targets, and attack types. In addition, targeted ports expose…

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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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Authentication 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…

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This 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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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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These 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…

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The sight of empty supermarket shelves during the COVID-19 pandemic brought home the fragility of our food supply chain. We can all see the importance of ensuring the security of the farming and agriculture industry. However, farming is becoming increasingly automated. This means new cybersecurity risks are emerging to stand alongside traditional risks like the…

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