There is not only a large increase in online security breaches in SA, but it is evident that as much as 70% occur in the application layer, Catherine de Klerk, technical consultant at Compuware, told members at the Information Security Group of Africa meeting.
The consequences of poor security are many, De Klerk explained, including stolen intellectual property, downtime, loss of productivity, damage to business reputation, loss of consumer confidence and severe financial losses.
"The first thing a hacker will do is attempt a buffer overrun, which can bring up an error message including sensitive data about your Web site. It is imperative that proper validation is done on all your fields," she emphasised.
Also on an application layer, De Klerk explained, hackers make use of form-based attacks, SQL injection, and bad error handling to obtain sensitive data with which to perform more damaging attacks.
"This type of hacking is not sophisticated," she stated. "There are various Web sites that teach us how to do this."
De Klerk insisted the greatest challenge that exists with clamping down on these types of crimes is that the attacker needs to understand only one vulnerability and has unlimited time. The defender, however, needs to understand all vulnerabilities equally well and works under time and cost constraints.
"Remember, the longer it takes to fix a bug, the more it will cost the company," she said.
De Klerk suggests one solution to reduce vulnerabilities at the application layer is for the developer to work with the solutions architect and system administrator, and to use application scanning software.
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