This post was originally published in Visartech Blog
What does the security testing term mean at all? According to Wikipedia, it is an assessment of the software vulnerability to various attacks.
What kind of attacks imply here?
Primarily it is an illegal breach of cybercriminals into the system aiming at extracting data about users or obtaining benefits for their own needs with the help of vulnerabilities present in the software code.
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Let’s see which hacking methods are popular nowadays and what dangers and risks they entail.
So how does it even happen that programmers write code with vulnerabilities, testers test it, and these weaknesses remain unrevealed in the process of creating software?
The thing is that both developers and testers use one approach in development and testing while hackers utilize another one when using the software.
Parties Involved
The developer takes care of software functionality and operability.
The quality assurance engineer verifies whether the program works correctly and according to the client’s requirements.
Hacker, on the contrary, aims to make a program work not the way it was intended to be. Finding out the ways to get a response from the program containing hidden data, or to send data to the server that it shouldn’t receive from a regular user are some primary goals. If such purposes have been achieved and a hacker gets access to the hidden data by some workaround or a loophole in the software, this is called hacking or finding vulnerabilities.
But as you know, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. There are security experts (the so-called White Hat hackers) who are aware of the most popular system vulnerabilities that the Black Hat hackers most often use.
After testing the system, they can provide a report or recommendations on how to improve its security, get rid of weaknesses, reduce the risks of confidential user data loss for the company and limit unauthorized access.
What Are the Most Widespread System Vulnerabilities?
The OWASP rating (Open Web Application Security Project) has allocated the top 10 software vulnerabilities for 2020. Let’s uncover each of them one by one!
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# 1. Injection
Injection flaws are very widespread, especially in legacy code. It can be SQL, XXE, XML insertion into the SQL, LDAP, XPath, or NoSQL queries, OS commands, XML parsers, SMTP headers, expression languages, and ORM queries or the encrypted requests sent to the server database.
Code examination with scanners and fuzzers may easily locate injection flaws.
Injection leads to data loss, corruption, or exposure to unauthorized parties, loss of accountability, access denial, or even to a complete host takeover.
The impact on the business activities business may vary depending on the app and data needs.
# 2. Broken Authentication
A weak authentication vulnerability could allow an attacker to use manual and/or automatic media while trying to gain control of any account that he/she wants in the system. The even worse situation is gaining complete control over the system.
To compromise the whole system gaining access to one administrator account or just a few random ones would be enough.
Such actions result in possible money laundering, social security fraud, and identity theft. Also, very sensitive legal information may be disclosed in these cases.
#3. Sensitive Data Exposure
Confidential data disclosure is one of the most common vulnerabilities. It consists of compromising data that should have been protected.
Examples of sensitive data: passwords, credit card numbers, permissions (such as system administrator privileges), social security numbers, health data, personal information.
#4. XML External Entities
An XML external entity app attack parses XML input. It happens when XML input containing a reference to an external entity is processed by a poorly configured XML parser. Most of such parsers are vulnerable to XXE attacks by default. That’s why the responsibility for ensuring that the application has no such vulnerability falls mainly upon the developer.
#5. Broken Access Control
While ensuring the website security, access control means restricting access to sections or pages that visitors can visit, depending on their needs.
For example, if you own an online store, you probably need access to the admin panel to add new products or set up a promotion for the upcoming holidays. However, hardly anyone else will need it. If ordinary visitors can access your login page, your online store becomes fragile to attacks. This is a major problem for almost all popular content management systems (CMS) these days. By default, they provide access to the admin panel from any place in the world.
If you want to know the rest 5 cybersecurity threats, check out the whole story here.
Conclusions
Security testing is a major type of app testing. It makes sure whether confidential data remains confidential by all means. Some security-related bugs can only be detected by highly experienced quality assurance engineers.
In this article, we’ve uncovered the most widespread software vulnerabilities today. In further materials, it will be possible to touch upon the topic of how to deal with these vulnerabilities. Stay tuned!
Do you wish to enhance your software security? Catch the chance to contact our experts now.
A danger foreseen is a danger avoided, you know!
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