Top 10 Major Concerns on How to Secure Your Website from Hacking
HOW TO PROTECT YOUR WEBSITE FROM HACKING: THE TOP 10 THREATS AND HOW TO GUARD AGAINST THEM
Securing your website from hacking attempts is crucial for every website owner. According to research by Positive Technologies, websites are the target of 26% of all cyberattacks, with another 49% aimed at enterprise infrastructure, which often relies on internet technologies.
The vulnerability of web applications can expose owners to economic, reputational, and various other risks. Hacked websites can serve as platforms for virus distribution, data theft, the disclosure of confidential information, and even penetration into a company's internal networks.
Let's explore the most common threats and how to protect against them.
Injection Attacks
Hackers frequently utilize input fields to inject grammatically valid constructions that disrupt the application's logic. This can introduce malicious code into applications that rely on SQL, noSQL, or LDAP.
SQL injection remains one of the most widespread forms of web application attacks.
Injections often occur when a website lacks restrictions on what users can input in fields and forms. Malicious code introduced in this manner could grant a hacker access to confidential information or administrative privileges.
Protection Measures:
Ensure output data aligns with the application's logic. If the application requests a name input, it should output that name, not the entire database.
Secure input fields. For instance, when entering a phone number, users should only be able to input numbers and a limited number of relevant symbols (like plus and brackets), not other characters. Usernames should not contain sequences like "--".
Automate vulnerability searches in your code using specialized analysis tools such as Raxis, DeepScan, Kiuwan, PVS-Studio, Gamma, and Reshift.
Faulty Authentication
The theft of personal data or unauthorized account access remains a prevalent issue.
Many sites fail to enforce password complexity requirements, such as limiting the number of login attempts. A hacker can crack an account through a brute-force attack – a method of exhaustive password guessing.
Protection Measures:
Slow down attacks with CAPTCHA — a mini-test that ensures a human is entering the password, not a program.
Enhance password quality and limit the number of login attempts. Introducing a mandatory interval after each attempt can also be effective.
Prohibit standard and overly simple login-password combinations, like "admin", "administrator", "password", "qwerty", "123456".
Ensure compliance with password complexity requirements: a minimum of 8 characters, including upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols.
Data Breach
Leveraging insecure protocols and inadequate encryption plays right into the hands of hackers. By using indirect indicators and side channels, attackers can determine encryption keys or methods.
In synchronization-based attacks, the speed at which an application processes and responds to certain requests can reveal the value of the information to the attacker.
Protection Measures:
Limit access to sensitive data to users without proper authorization.
Use robust encryption to protect data and connections.
External Entity Attacks (XXE)
Targeting the XML parser, a hacker can inject external entities into a document, leading to local file disclosure or, in some cases, arbitrary code execution.
Such attacks are feasible if the application uses XML to transmit data between the server and the user's browser. The XML specification can be hazardous and potentially used to access any server files available to the application itself.
Protection Measures:
Disable the processing of external entities in the XML parser.
Employ methods that allow for the detection and exclusion of external objects, such as file paths or links.
Broken Access Control
When access control is compromised, an attacker with access to an account may utilize rights that the account should not have. A standard account could sometimes read and copy files that should only be accessible to an administrator.
How does this happen? Administrative rights and application management might be improperly configured or not configured at all, allowing attackers to forge an administrator session or gain administrative privileges.
Protection Measures:
Clearly differentiate the rights of each role within all available logic functions: administrator, user, guest, etc.
Implement access control at every level.
Presentation: Hide information about unavailable functions.
Logic: Avoid implementing features that alter the model's state prior to user authentication.
Data: Ensure only data necessary for a specific role is accessible (row-level security).
Make object identifiers random: attackers should not be able to predict future identifier values based on those already observed.
Improper Security Configuration
Frameworks, servers, database servers, and the applications themselves can all be vulnerable and insecure.
Researchers find vulnerabilities in systems and components on a daily basis. Protecting against zero-day vulnerabilities—viruses and weaknesses for which a defense has not yet been developed—is particularly challenging.
The use of insecure components can lead to information theft and large-scale attacks.
When an application uses insecure components, attackers can learn everything they need to know about the components, servers, and much more.
Protection Measures
Enable default security settings for servers.
Do not include test credentials or confidential information in the final versions of software.
Exclude “Server” and “Version” headers in HTTP responses to prevent hackers from exploiting this information.
Set the “secure” and “httpOnly” flags to enhance the security of Cookie files.
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
These attacks typically occur in the form of injection. Arbitrary scripts are executed on the client (browser) in the context of the attacked site, bypassing the same-origin policy that usually governs script sources.
Attackers inject a script onto the victim's website page. This script executes each time the site is visited. One of the simplest examples is when a user clicks on an insecure link, enters their social media credentials, and they fall into the hands of attackers. Most modern browsers analyze site scripts and warn of potential threats.
Protection Measures:
Maintain security by filtering input and output on websites.
Enable browser-level protection.
Install browser updates to keep security settings current.
Insecure Deserialization
Deserialization is when a stream of byte data is converted back into objects. Malicious or tampered objects can pose serious security issues. Attackers can exploit this for remote code execution and program launches.
Protection Measures:
Do not deserialize data from untrusted sources. In such cases, it is safer to use JSON and XML.
Ensure data integrity with digital signatures when serialized data is used in HTTP requests.
Make sure deserialization enforces strict type constraints for all objects.
Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities
Releasing error-free code is not enough. Attackers can also target software from external publishers that you use.
Vulnerabilities can exist in third-party libraries and frameworks. Hackers are aware of known vulnerabilities in popular libraries. Sometimes vulnerabilities or backdoors are intentionally inserted into external components.
Protection Measures:
Use the latest versions of all external code.
Minimize the use of third-party components.
Keep up with news about vulnerabilities in the components you use. When such vulnerabilities become known, install patches as quickly as possible. Even in the absence of patches, you can still protect your systems by implementing security policy updates, as was possible during the WannaCry outbreak.
Insufficient Monitoring and Logging
A seemingly minor incident can be part of a larger attack. The inability to capture and store comprehensive information hinders the identification of potential risks and threats. Thus, it is crucial to investigate even incidents that initially appear trivial.
Protection Measures:
Implement incident handling procedures.
Ensure adherence to relevant standards and regulations: HIPAA, ISO, PCI DSS.
Continuously adopt modern protective practices.
Enhance monitoring efforts.
General Rules for Protecting Web Applications
Securing web applications with 100% certainty is impossible, but minimizing risks is achievable. An important step towards this goal is the implementation of a Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL).
To incorporate SDL, the following measures should be applied at each stage of development:
Idea: Understand the concept of SDL and train staff.
Planning: Threat modeling, tracking external software, security requirements, GAP analysis.
Design and Development: Code review, static analysis, vulnerability scanning.
Testing: Fuzzing, dynamic analysis.
Release: Final GAP analysis, final security testing.
Support: Monitoring and verification of external software, vulnerability search.
Closure/Sale: Proper data deletion, e.g., crypto-shredding.
As you can see, this is a complex and lengthy process. Fully implementing SDL requires significant investment in both the acquisition of additional software and the hiring of qualified security specialists.
Checklist for Protecting Your Site from Hacking
Install a web application firewall (WAF) to protect your site. It secures the web application, even if vulnerabilities exist or new threats emerge. WAF can halt known attacks at the application and logic level. Moreover, it detects zero-day vulnerability attacks, prevents user-targeted attacks, analyses, and correlates events in reconstructing attack chains. Ideally, WAF should integrate with external Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and DDoS mitigation solutions. WAF integration with an automatic source code analyzer allows for the use of virtual patches that close vulnerabilities before they are fixed in the code.
Regularly conduct security assessments of websites and rectify identified vulnerabilities. Where possible, perform white-box testing – audits with full access to the application code. Tests should be conducted at all stages of the site development cycle, not just at the last minute before launch.
Avoid using outdated server versions, operating systems, CMS, or libraries. Regularly update all these systems and install fresh patches.
Record and investigate all attempts at attacks and security system failures. Timely identification of the threat source helps minimize risks.
Use a source code analyzer. This software finds code vulnerabilities and weaknesses early on. It's much easier and cheaper to fix bugs at the beginning of the development process. Most code analyzers can protect your application from common vulnerabilities.
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