Cis 502 Web Server Application Attack

According to the Federal Trade Commission Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the United States of America. They estimated that 10 million people a year are victimized by the crime which comes out to about 19 people per minute are becoming victims of this crime. Given these extremely worrying statistics it has never been more important to be informed about the crime of identity theft and how to avoid it in your daily life especially as more schemes and ways to unknowingly forfeit your information are introduced with the prevalence of the World Wide Web (www, w3). More than just knowledge of the crime of identity theft it is also important to know what protections you can set to help protect your information. Also, given the amount of businesses and organizations, and the various vulnerabilities that their systems may have, that must have access and know significant information about your life it is also invaluable to understand how to recover from your information being lost. This paper will be used to inform about this growing crime including what identity theft is and the different types that exist, what information is most important to protect, what you can do to avoid it, how to recover from it and what that may entail, and how this applies to the field of computer science and what should be looked for when building systems, and different kinds of attacks that can happen.

The purpose of this paper is to touch on the issue of Hacking. It will go into detail about the history, evolution, future and prevention of Hacking. In addition, this paper will discuss different types of hackers and their motivation behind hacking. This paper examines the major impact caused by malicious hackers and give modern examples of such attacks. To conclude, it will predict how hacking will be in the near future and give the precautionary measures Information Security professionals can take to mitigate the risk of being victimized.

Some security risks involved with conducting business online are imposters, eavesdroppers and thieves. Also, there are crackers or hackers, which are people who write programs and manipulate technologies to obtain unauthorized access to computers and networks. The elements of computer security are secrecy, integrity and necessity. Secrecy is protecting against unauthorized data disclosure. Integrity is preventing data from being modified by someone who is unauthorized and ensuring that the contents of emails aren’t changed before they get to he recipient. Necessity is preventing data delays or denials. It is important to establish a security policy to protect assets, to define acceptance and unacceptable behavior and to review physical and

Restaurants have a tendency to be targets for cyber criminals. These criminals steal and reconfigure the payment card data for their own purposes. At the Heartland Cafe, Tom has a chance to be a target for a cyber attack by being in a high-traffic area. If the customer is compromised, Heartland Cafe will quickly lose public trust and perhaps Tom will lose the business altogether. Extra measures toward risk management should be taken to ensure that the business itself remains safe. Compliance with PCI-DSS protocols, PTS requirements and the franchisor should inform the franchisee of any software that could translate

Michael’s Store, Inc. is an arts & crafts Retail chain. It has more than 1040 stores located in 49 US states & Canada. The company also owns and operates the Aaron brother’s retail chain, which happens to have an additional 115 stores across the Country. Michael’s store Inc. had a Security breach, which took place between May 8, 2013 and January 27, 2014. About 2.6 million cards or about 7 percent of payment cards used at its stores during the period were affected. Alarmingly, its subsidiary Aaron brothers also had been breached between June 26, 2013 and February 27, 2014. It was reported that Aaron brothers had 400,000 cards impacted. The duration of the treacherous attack in total was 8 months (Schwartz, 2014). In this report, security breach of Michael’s store Inc. is analyzed. The topics covered are how the breach occurred, what did the authorities do to educate the customers & how in future such attacks can be avoided.

One important part of E-Commerce is maintaining stringent site security, confidentiality for the customers, integrity, and availability, also a secure system must contain authentication verification of the user, Authorization, allowing manipulation of the resources in a specific way and Encryption for records and transactions.

The Server-Side Includes attack allows the exploitation of a web application by injecting scripts in HTML pages or executing arbitrary codes remotely. It can be exploited through manipulation of SSI in use in the application or force its use through user input fields. The attacker can access sensitive information, such as password files, and execute shell commands. The SSI directives are injected in input fields and they are sent to the web server. The web server parses and executes the directives before supplying the page. Then, the attack result will be viewable the next time that the page is loaded for the user's browser.

“The practice of keeping data protected from corruption and unauthorized access” is known as data security (SpamLaw, 2011). The focal point of data security is the protection of

Security of transactions is critical in building the confidence of customers in a specified e-commerce site. This security depends heavily on an organization 's ability to ensure authenticity, availability, privacy, integrity and disruption of unwanted intrusions. Malicious program known as sniffer programs often disrupt the privacy transactions especially when one uses unauthorized networks. They are found at network connection end points. When transactions are carried out, confidentiality is necessary thus it requires removing of any data showing transaction paths. This has become a common problem in the e-commerce sites.

The breaches happen in the organization if the network administrator/Security chief of the organization is not keen in observing and if the employee is careless or not aware then the hacker gains access to lot of confidential information. (Data Breaches, n.d.)

A Web Service is software which is available over the internet and uses the standardized XML messaging system. To encode the communications, XML is used. Web services are self-contained, modular, distributed, dynamic applications that can be described, published, located, or invoked over the network to create products, processes, and supply chains. These applications can be local, distributed, or web-based. Web services are built on top of open standards such as TCP/IP, HTTP, Java, HTML, and XML. Web Services have three main components – Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and they are built on XML and HTTP platforms.

The greatest area of vulnerability and potential for damage or data loss of web applications and

The internet is a medium that is becoming progressively important as it makes information available in a quick and easy manner. It has transformed communications and acts as a global network that allows people to communicate and interact without being limited by time, boarders and distance. However, the infrastructure is vulnerable to hackers who use the system to commit cyber crime. To accomplish this, they make use of innovative stealth techniques for their malicious purposes in the internet.

Their operations are very slick and swift such that stolen data is quickly exploited within seconds of being submitted by unsuspecting victims. Since 2005, over 400,000 databases have been compromised since 2005, and thousands more have gone unnoticed or reported. About 40 percent of those involved in IT security have no fixed figure on the number of hackings their companies have experienced. One of the rapidly increasing areas of ecommerce is in the use of web-based applications to replace traditional over-the counter transactions. Hackers have expectedly, latched on. According to a study by Gartner, over 75 percent of Internet security breaches are due to flaws and loop holes in software. The reason for this is that, applications are normally designed and put together quickly to get the system running, and no time is spend analyzing and assessing security implications. As computer hackers continue to step up their operations in line with technology advancements, the securities and future industry recorded a 150 percent increase in the number of suspicious activities detected by their systems. During the same time, research carried out at the University of Maryland indicated that a computer connected to the Internet was subject to an attempted hack every 40 seconds. The battle between ecommerce websites and consumers wages on, according to an independent analyst, ‘consumers are losing a tug of war.’ Simon Smelt, an economist who runs a survey company

In today’s highly connected digital ecosystem, our lives, businesses, communications, and a lot of activities depend on the websites and web applications. All websites contain sensitive data and deliver business-critical information services to the targeted audience. Due to the rapidly increasing use of websites and web applications, vulnerabilities have become quite rampant. Even the smallest security loophole can give cybercriminals a chance to destroy the web-based business, damage customer confidence, and brand reputation in a short time span.