on 23-Jan-202305:00 - edited on 27-Apr-202315:07 by LiefZimmerman
Introduction:
In thisOWASP Automated ThreatArticle we'll be highlightingOAT-014 Vulnerability Scanningwith some basic threat information as well as a recorded demo to dive into the concepts deeper. In our demo we'll show how Vulnerability Scanning can be a threat to your applications and how to quickly offer protection from these automated scanners. We'll wrap it up by highlightingF5 Bot Defenseto show how we solve this problem for our customers.
Description:
Systematic enumeration and examination of identifiable, guessable and unknown content locations, paths, file names, parameters, in order to find weaknesses and points where a security vulnerability might exist. Vulnerability Scanning includes both malicious scanning and friendly scanning by an authorised vulnerability scanning engine. It differs from OAT-011 Scraping in that its aim is to identify potential vulnerabilities.
Crawl and fuzz application to identify weaknesses and possible vulnerabilities.
OAT-015 Attack Demographics:
Sectors Targeted
Parties Affected
Data Commonly Misused
Other Names and Examples
Possible Symptoms
Entertainment
Application Owner
Other Business Data
Active/Passive Scanning
Highly Elevated Occurrence of Errors
Financial
Public Information
Known Vulnerability Scanning
Extremely high application usage from a single IP address
Government
Malicious Crawling
Exotic value for HTTP user agent header
Retail
Vulnerability Reconnaissance
Disproportionate use of the payment step
Technology
High ratio of GET/POST to HEAD requests for a user
Social Networking
Low ratio of static to dynamic content requests for a user/session/IP address compared to typical users
Education
Protecting your Applications from Vulnerability Scanning:
In this demo we will be showing how attackers leverage scanning tools to search for vulnerabilities. We'll then have a look at the same attack with F5 Distributed Cloud protecting the application.
In Conclusion:
Vulnerability scanning occurs across the internet constantly to all exposed surfaces from many locations, regions and systems. Some of these have good intentions, some do not. Our goal is to limit exposure and to minimize risk. By blocking bad bots and only allowing good bots you are protecting your applications from threat actors possibly finding a vulnerability and switching to a manual attack phase of your web applications.
