A Comprehensive Guide On How to Protect Your Websites From Hackers

When WWW (world wide web) came into existence, it was meant to
share information over the Internet, from there part through
natural evolution and part through webonomics driving innovations,
Internet & www has metamorphosized into the lifeblood of the
world.

It is hard to imagine now how the world functioned before the
time of the Internet. It has touched each aspect of human life and
is now critical for day to day existence. No business today can
exist without an online presence. It is no more just a medium to
share information, but world economics runs over the web
nowadays.

Organizations, governments, and people all depend on this. New
warfares will not happen in the real world but would be fought over
the cyber world. So essentially, cybersecurity is as important or
more important than physical security for any business,
organization, or government.

Try getting a website online without any protection, and you
will immediately start seeing some traffic hits on your site. It is
not because your site is something that everyone is looking for,
but it is more because there are bots on the Internet that are
continually looking for sites that can be exploited. To understand
how to protect your site, one needs to understand how an attack
happens.

How and why does an attack happen?

Attacks on-site happen for many reasons; it could be to steal
private data, for some financial gains or just pure malicious
reason to ensure genuine users are not able to reach your site.

Whatever be the reason, an attack on the website can be painful
and can have a catastrophic effect. Attackers generally try and
exploit security vulnerabilities found in applications; various
stages of attack can be generally thought as follows.

Reconnaissance attack:

During a reconnaissance attack, attackers try to get information of
a website and see where the vulnerabilities lie, the intruder
queries the alive IP in the network and then for the ports to
determine the type and version of the application and operating
system running on the target host and then tries to see what
vulnerabilities are found in the application.

This is generally done through automated bots, and it is due to
this that when a website goes online immediately, there is an
uptake of traffic and bots around on the Internet, which keep
looking for sites to get any information that can be used by
attackers.

Exploitation:

Once vulnerabilities are found in a site, attackers then weaponize
the requests based on the vulnerabilities found and launch attacks,
and this is done to exploit the vulnerabilities for some malicious
intent.

Depending on the attacker’s intention, the attack against the
website can be launched either to bring down the whole site
altogether or to escalate from there.

Command & Control:

If the attacker chooses to escalate, then using the exploit, he
might try to get control of the internal system or privilege
control for the exfiltration of data from the targeted website or
to infiltrate some financial crime.

How to keep your site secured?

However, that is just not enough because as technology improves,
attackers are also becoming sophisticated—they can figure out
website vulnerabilities to exploit even if it is behind a
firewall.

Therefore, the best defense is to not have a vulnerable
application out on the web, and in order to do this, one needs to
identify the vulnerabilities found in the application and fix
them.

Vulnerabilities can be found through automated scans. There are
multiple automated scans out there, but a good scanner should be
able to crawl the application, mimick user behavior to identify
different workflows, and identify vulnerabilities.

That said, automated scan alone is not enough to ensure an
application is thoroughly tested from a security perspective. Some
flaws, such as CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) and business logic
vulnerabilities, require a human to be in the loop to exploit and
verify the vulnerability.

Only Manual Pen Testing (MPT) can provide identification and
manual validation of these vulnerabilities. Any flaw where a real,
human judgment call is needed is where pen-testing truly
shines.

Some categories of vulnerabilities, such as authorization issues
and business logic flaws, cannot be found with automated
assessments and will always require a skilled penetration tester to
identify them.

During manual PT, the penetration testers understand the
application through a thorough application walk-through by talking
to the customer and understanding the nature of the application,
which helps them understand and define accurate business logic test
cases as per the application that needs to be tested.

Post this, they test the application during run time and figure
out vulnerabilities that are consolidated along with the automated
scanning results and presented in comprehensive testing reports
that include proof of concept and screenshots of every
vulnerability to find out loopholes in a step by step process.
Essentially experts do ethical hacking to identify vulnerabilities
before attackers do.

Here are some examples of business logic flaws that Manual Pen
Testing teams undertake in their testing scenarios:

• Malicious file upload, where the testing team will try
  to upload unsupportive files to the application and figure out
  whether those files can put any kind of severe impact on the server
  end.
• Price manipulation and product manipulation in e-commerce
  applications where they will try to change the price or
  quantity of products to overcome the business validation for
  pricing.

Pen Testing will also validate all authorization test cases as well
in which they will try to bypass the authorization mechanism and
access authorized pages/files/data from unauthenticated user/less
privileged user.

Once the vulnerabilities are found, the application
vulnerability needs to be fixed before the application goes live so
that there is no application that is vulnerable and can be
exploited by attackers.

Unfortunately, though many organization makes the best effort to
ensure their websites and web apps are not vulnerable on the web,
reality kicks in.

There is always pressure on businesses to continually evolve and
innovate, and in this quest, security takes a back seat. Many
times, organizations do not have the security expertise to ensure
their sites are safe, so they end up employing the wrong tools or
the security measures they have in place most of the time remain
inadequate.

How can AppTrana help you?

AppTrana is the only solution in the
industry that offers a comprehensive solution to provide
organizations with the ability to identify the risk profile of
their application and protect them immediately. The best part is
organizations are not expected to have any security expertise,
AppTrana is a completely managed security solution.

With AppTrana, customers get the ability to scan their
application through its automated scanner to find out
vulnerabilities. In addition to it, customers can also request
Premium Scans (manual pen testing scans) where Indusface security
experts scan the application through ethical hacking means to find
any business logic vulnerabilities in the application and give
customers a complete risk profile of their application.

It does not stop there. AppTrana comes with an inbuilt web
application firewall where the vulnerabilities found can be
immediately protected.

The rules in the AppTrana portal are written by Indusface
security experts. There is no need for customers to have any
expertise. AppTrana has 3 sets of rules:

• Advance — which is fine-tuned for FPs, and they can be
  put in block mode immediately.
• Premium — which is monitored and tuned for application
  characters
• Custom — which customers can request based on specific
  application needs.

AppTrana provides a comprehensive view of vulnerabilities found in
the application, and the protection status indicates they are
protected in the WAF layer or not. Based on these, customers can
ensure their web apps and websites are always secure, and there are
no assets that are vulnerable, which can be exploited by attackers.

Try out AppTrana now. Start with a 14-day free trial^[2].

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