Web and mobile applications are at the core of most companies’ activities. Whether you’ve already deployed them or that they are still under development, some misconceptions about their security are still present, even though it is a crucial topic to conduct your business in good conditions.
Here are the 9 preconceived ideas that we most often encountered.
During a security audit, 3 approaches are possible. They reflect different levels of information and access given to pentesters. The choice of the approach for a penetration testing depends on your objectives: how deep do you want the tests to be? And would you like to test the external or internal threat?
WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Shopify and many more, offer real possibilities for creating sites that are both ergonomic and efficient. However, a negative image is still associated with CMS websites: they would be insecure and easy targets for malicious hackers.
What are the risks of cyberattacks on these sites? What specific elements of CMS are to be monitored?
If you are in charge of a CMS platform, this article will help you to identify the main risks and will provide you with points of vigilance to reinforce the level of security.
Do you know why phishing is so dangerous?
Because it combines IT skills with knowledge of human psychology. In fact, a phishing email relies on human psychological drivers to first get the opening of the email and to then push to click.
Technical skills are of course necessary to increase the likelihood of clicks, e.g. to spoof a legitimate sender, to create an interface clone, to forward to malicious domains, etc.
But today, we will look into the psychological drivers that drive action during phishing. We have taken 8 commonly used drivers and associated them with different subjects that can be used as pretexts for phishing.
Defining the scope of a penetration test is a delicate step. What will be the target of the pentest? More precisely, which functional and technical aspects should be tested in priority? Moreover, how deep and how often should a pentest be recommended?
Pancake is an online invoicing, project management, time tracking and proposal software. A shared hardcoded secret used to sign the session cookie allowed us to forge a valid session cookie for any account for all Pancake applications before 4.13.29.
An XXE (XML External Entities) is a vulnerability ranked in the Top 10 OWASP and affecting programs interpreting XML.
Its main characteristic is the ability to read files on the target server. It can thus endanger it, for example, by accessing a configuration file containing passwords, by copying database files or by retrieving the source code of an application.
Digital has become central for the health sector. It applies to all activities, from patient admissions to prescription management to monitoring the physical environment. In this context, cybersecurity risks have also become widespread. Conducting a security audit enables to concretely assess risks for each institution or company of the health sector.
Here is an overview of the cybersecurity challenges that we frequently encounter and that can be points of attention during a pentest. While data protection is a major issue, other risks related to hardware and IT infrastructure are also recurring points of concern.
Fintech companies are generally more exposed to risks and more mature than the average in terms of cybersecurity. The nature of their activities implies the need to take into account the risks of fraud and cyberattacks right from the design of a new product.
The pentest then confronts the security choices and protections in place with the real threat. Depending on the nature of the product (payment solution, credit platform, banking management, private equity, etc.), the business stakes will be different. However, here are a few details on the main risks and the most frequent pentest priorities according to our experience with fintech companies.
Performing a pentest can be part of your objectives, without it being the priority of the moment. This for various reasons: developments are in progress, a migration is planned, a budget has not yet been allocated, etc. Given the different constraints and priorities that need to be respected, when is the right time to perform a pentest?
We will present various situations in which the question arises and give you some keys to identify the right time to perform a penetration test.
Currently, since March 2018, SSL/TLS certificates (more commonly called HTTPS certificate) can have a maximum lifetime of 825 days.
But in March 2020, Apple announced that they only will allow SSL/TLS certificates on Safari that have a maximum validity of 398 days (13 months). And Google will follow this path (announced by the chair emeritus of CA/B Forum on Twitter in June 2020).
In July, Mozilla has confirmed it will reduce certificate lifespans too.
There are several types of IT security audits: organizational audits, technical audits and penetration testing.
All these variants are complementary and enable to analyze optimally an organization’s level of security. In this article, we will voluntarily leave aside the organizational audits in order to focus on the technical aspects of security audits.
Storing passwords securely is a recurring concern.
But what are the main methods, how do they work, and what are they worth against current password cracking techniques?
In this article we explain the main principles of secure storage (hash, salt, pepper, iteration) and highlight their importance for resisting password recovery methods. Finally, we will talk about a reliable hash function for secure storage.