Glossary of Security Terms: OWASP

OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) is a non-profit organization and worldwide network that works for security in Free Software, especially on the Web.

Learn more

General knowledge

• Official website

Credits

• Source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/OWASP
• Published under Open CC Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license

#mozilla #security-terms #password-protection #data-protection #web-development #mdn #beginners

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

Best Custom Web & Mobile App Development Company

Everything around us has become smart, like smart infrastructures, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, to name a few. The innovation of smart devices makes it possible to achieve these heights in science and technology. But, data is vulnerable, there is a risk of attack by cybercriminals. To get started, let’s know about IoT devices.

What are IoT devices?

The Internet Of Things(IoT) is a system that interrelates computer devices like sensors, software, and actuators, digital machines, etc. They are linked together with particular objects that work through the internet and transfer data over devices without humans interference.

Famous examples are Amazon Alexa, Apple SIRI, Interconnected baby monitors, video doorbells, and smart thermostats.

How could your IoT devices be vulnerable?

When technologies grow and evolve, risks are also on the high stakes. Ransomware attacks are on the continuous increase; securing data has become the top priority.

When you think your smart home won’t fudge a thing against cybercriminals, you should also know that they are vulnerable. When cybercriminals access our smart voice speakers like Amazon Alexa or Apple Siri, it becomes easy for them to steal your data.

Cybersecurity report 2020 says popular hacking forums expose 770 million email addresses and 21 million unique passwords, 620 million accounts have been compromised from 16 hacked websites.

The attacks are likely to increase every year. To help you secure your data of IoT devices, here are some best tips you can implement.

Tips to secure your IoT devices

1. Change Default Router Name

Your router has the default name of make and model. When we stick with the manufacturer name, attackers can quickly identify our make and model. So give the router name different from your addresses, without giving away personal information.

2. Know your connected network and connected devices

If your devices are connected to the internet, these connections are vulnerable to cyber attacks when your devices don’t have the proper security. Almost every web interface is equipped with multiple devices, so it’s hard to track the device. But, it’s crucial to stay aware of them.

3. Change default usernames and passwords

When we use the default usernames and passwords, it is attackable. Because the cybercriminals possibly know the default passwords come with IoT devices. So use strong passwords to access our IoT devices.

4. Manage strong, Unique passwords for your IoT devices and accounts

Use strong or unique passwords that are easily assumed, such as ‘123456’ or ‘password1234’ to protect your accounts. Give strong and complex passwords formed by combinations of alphabets, numeric, and not easily bypassed symbols.

Also, change passwords for multiple accounts and change them regularly to avoid attacks. We can also set several attempts to wrong passwords to set locking the account to safeguard from the hackers.

5. Do not use Public WI-FI Networks

Are you try to keep an eye on your IoT devices through your mobile devices in different locations. I recommend you not to use the public WI-FI network to access them. Because they are easily accessible through for everyone, you are still in a hurry to access, use VPN that gives them protection against cyber-attacks, giving them privacy and security features, for example, using Express VPN.

6. Establish firewalls to discover the vulnerabilities

There are software and firewalls like intrusion detection system/intrusion prevention system in the market. This will be useful to screen and analyze the wire traffic of a network. You can identify the security weakness by the firewall scanners within the network structure. Use these firewalls to get rid of unwanted security issues and vulnerabilities.

7. Reconfigure your device settings

Every smart device comes with the insecure default settings, and sometimes we are not able to change these default settings configurations. These conditions need to be assessed and need to reconfigure the default settings.

8. Authenticate the IoT applications

Nowadays, every smart app offers authentication to secure the accounts. There are many types of authentication methods like single-factor authentication, two-step authentication, and multi-factor authentication. Use any one of these to send a one time password (OTP) to verify the user who logs in the smart device to keep our accounts from falling into the wrong hands.

9. Update the device software up to date

Every smart device manufacturer releases updates to fix bugs in their software. These security patches help us to improve our protection of the device. Also, update the software on the smartphone, which we are used to monitoring the IoT devices to avoid vulnerabilities.

10. Track the smartphones and keep them safe

When we connect the smart home to the smartphone and control them via smartphone, you need to keep them safe. If you miss the phone almost, every personal information is at risk to the cybercriminals. But sometimes it happens by accident, makes sure that you can clear all the data remotely.

However, securing smart devices is essential in the world of data. There are still cybercriminals bypassing the securities. So make sure to do the safety measures to avoid our accounts falling out into the wrong hands. I hope these steps will help you all to secure your IoT devices.

If you have any, feel free to share them in the comments! I’d love to know them.

Are you looking for more? Subscribe to weekly newsletters that can help your stay updated IoT application developments.

#iot #enterprise iot security #how iot can be used to enhance security #how to improve iot security #how to protect iot devices from hackers #how to secure iot devices #iot security #iot security devices #iot security offerings #iot security technologies iot security plus #iot vulnerable devices #risk based iot security program

OWASP Top 10 API Security - DZone Security

I am sure that almost all of you would be aware about OWASP. But, just for the context let me just brief about the same.

OWASP is an international non-profit organization that is dedicated to web application security. It is a completely opensource and community driven effort to share articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the field of web application security.

When we talk about API, we are almost every time talking about REST and OWASP has a dedicated project to API security. As this series of articles are focused towards the API security, we shall not be going in details of web application security. You can use the provided links to find more about these. Let us spend some time on the background, before we dive deep in to API security project.

Background

OWASP’s most widely acknowledged project is OWASP top 10. This is the list of security risks compiled by the security experts from across the world. This report is continuously updated, outlining the concerns of web application security, and specially focuses on the Top 10 of the most critical risks. According to OWASP, this report is an “The OWASP Top 10 is a standard awareness document for developers and web application security. It represents a broad consensus about the most critical security risks to web applications.” They recommend that all companies incorporate the report into their processes in order to minimize and/or mitigate security risks. The latest version was published in 2017 and below is the list.

1. Injection
2. Broken Authentication
3. Sensitive Data Exposure
4. XML Eternal Entities (or XXE)
5. Broken Access Control
6. Security Misconfiguration
7. Cross-Site Scripting (or XSS)
8. Insecure Deserialization
9. Using Components With known vulenerabilities
10. Insufficient Logging And Monitoring

How API Security Is Different from Web Application Security

Although API’s have many similarities with web applications, but both are fundamentally different in nature.

In web applications, all the processing is done on the servers and the resulting web page is sent back to web-browser for rendering. Because of this nature, they have limited entry point and attack surface which are resulting web pages. This can easily be protected by putting up and web-application firewall (WAF) in front of the application server.

In most of the modern application UI itself uses API’s to send and receive data from backend servers and provide the functionality of the application. It is the responsibility of the clients to do the rendering and convert the responses to a web page.

Also, with the rise of microservices architecture individual components become APIs, and it becomes a different world altogether, where UI clients could interact with hundreds of services via API calls. This significantly increases the attack surface. Now all those API’s become the entry point and attack surface.

These entry points can’t be guarded using the WAF solutions as they cannot differentiate between the legitimate and malicious API calls.

Why A Separate Project on API security?

Since its first release in 2003 OWASP top 10 projects has been the most useful resource in terms of web application security risks and to suggest the ways to mitigate these issues.

These days almost all the application development like banking, retail, transportation, smart devices, are done with the APIs.

APIs are critical to modern mobile and SaaS application. By nature, the API’s expose business logic and data, often these data are sensitive in nature, for example Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Because of this API’s are increasingly being targeted by attackers.

As API’s are changing how we design and develop our application, this is also changing the way we think about our security. A new approach in needed in terms of security risks. To cater to this need, OWASP decided to come up with another version of Top 10 dedicated to API security which is named “OWASP API Security Project”. The first report was released on 26 December 2019.

Below is the OWASP Top 10 API security risks and their brief description as provided by the official report.

API1:2019 Broken Object Level Authorization

APIs tend to expose endpoints that handle object identifiers, creating a wide attack surface Level Access Control issue. Object level authorization checks should be considered in every function that accesses a data source using an input from the user.

API2:2019 Broken User Authentication

Authentication mechanisms are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise authentication tokens or to exploit implementation flaws to assume other user’s identities temporarily or permanently. Compromising system’s ability to identify the client/user, compromises API security overall.

#security #api security #owasp top 10 #api penetration testing #api security risks #owasp top 10 web security risk

Injecting security in CI/CD pipelines with SonarQube, WhiteSource, OWASP DC and OWASP ZAP 

This article spans around injecting good security practices to CI/CD pipelines with few of the good open source tools available in the market. The same approach can be applied to most of the projects developed in other programming languages out there. For the illustration purpose, I have used .NetCore App. Mainly below are the set of security tools that is used in the build pipeline (CI) and in the release pipeline (CD)

• Build Pipeline
• 1. SonarQube — Sonar is for executing static code analysis
• 2. White Source — Scanning vulnerabilities in open source third party libraries (Node js, typescripts, nugget…)
• 3. OWASP Dependency-Check (DC) — Used to scan for security vulnerability (dll, jar…)
• Release Pipeline
• 1. OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) — Tool for doing penetration testing on the websites

A representation of the entire pipeline will look something like the screenshot below;

The Azure Devops Agents must be installed on the build machine of yours, so that Azure Devops ( SaaS) can communicate with the machine. The installation procedure can be found here. The pipelines start with a code check-in trigger, which in turn starts the build process.

SonarQube

SonarQube is an automatic code review tool to detect bugs, vulnerabilities, and code smells in your code. I am using a dockerized version of sonar, running in my build machine. You may get started with the procedure mentioned here. Once the sonar portal is set up, we need to create Auth token for talking with Azure DevOps. To create one, go to the user settings screen in Sonar Portal and create a token from there. Make sure that the token has the necessary permission to update the portal.

#devops #security #owasp #whitesource #owasp dc #owasp zap

10 Cyber Security Tools to Watch Out for in 2021 - DZone Security

With an immense number of companies and entities climbing onto the digital bandwagon, cybersecurity considerations have come up as limelight. Besides, new technologies such as Big Data, IoT, and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning are gradually more making inroads into our everyday lives, the threats related to cybercrime are mounting as well. Additionally, the usage of mobile and web apps in transacting financial information has put the complete digital stuff exposed to cybersecurity breaches. The inherent risks and vulnerabilities found in such apps can be exploited by attackers or cybercriminals to draw off crucial information data counting money. Internationally, cyber-security breaches have caused a yearly loss of USD 20.38 million in 2019 (Source: Statista). Plus, cybercrime has led to a 0.80 percent loss of the entire world’s Gross domestic product, which sums up to approx. USD 2.1 trillion in the year 2019 alone (Source: Cybriant.com).

In this article, take a look at ten cyber security tools to watch out for in 2021, including NMap, Wireshark, Metasploit, and more!

#security #cyber security #security testing #security testing tools #cyber security tools

Cloud Security: Is it Worth it?

Storing and managing corporate data by applying the cloud is becoming more and more popular. Companies grow, and it gets too expensive, and resources consuming to store their data on traditional servers. To prove it, look at the research conducted by Google in 2019 that includes insights for the cloud computing market for the next 10 years.

Around 80% of US respondents (about 1,100 businesses participated) revealed that they are thinking about cloud adoption by 2029. In 2019, only about 40% made a switch. 72% of businesses state that they’d like to automate security solutions by 2029, while now only 33% actually do it.

What do these numbers tell us? That companies seem to be suspicious about cloud security and prefer traditional on-premises data storage to the cloud environment. Why are they afraid to entrust cloud providers with their data? What to do to get rid of this fear? How to prove that the future of security is after the cloud?

In our article, we aim to answer these questions and more, but first, you need to be able to identify the reasons why companies have cloud-related trust issues. The first step in eliminating a problem is identifying it, let’s do it together!

#cloud-security #security-of-data #cybersecurity #cloud-computing #aws-security #azure-security #data-breaches #cyber-security