ThreatX - Blog

I joined ThreatX’s SOC as the Director of Security about 30 days ago now, and as with any SOC, days are hectic.  In some cases, nights are too. Even so, one of my first objectives at ThreatX was to meet with a few current customers to gather feedback from them about what is working, and what isn’t. 

As the demands of both modern applications and complex threat landscapes have continued to increase, many organizations have been forced to adopt an ever-growing list of new, specialized security tools in an attempt to keep pace. This often includes a mixture of WAFs, anti-bot tools, DDoS prevention, behavioral and analytics tools, intelligence feeds, and more. However, a fractured approach to security is rarely effective and almost never efficient. 

On August 7 and 8 in Las Vegas, thousands of cybersecurity enthusiasts, practitioners and executives will be in attendance at Black Hat 2019. We are thrilled to be among the participants at this year's event.

Just when you think you are one step ahead of hackers, they prove you wrong and set you four steps back. Hackers continue to find new and more devious ways of finding web app vulnerabilities and exploiting them. One such tactic is leveraging malicious bots and automation, which has grown in frequency, volume, and complexity. In fact, nearly 20% of all web traffic comes from malicious bots.*

In the previous post, I outlined a number of malicious automation attacks that we often see targeted against web applications and identified which industries and business types are most commonly attacked. In 2019 alone, we have seen each one of these attacks attempted on one or more of our customers. In this post, I'll share a case study for each attack type and include preventative mitigation techniques (in order of importance) to help avoid future attacks.

We live in a world where new application security vulnerabilities are discovered daily. Additionally, the advent of botnets and crypto currency mining has increased the attractiveness of targets. There are two major techniques utilized by attackers to find vulnerable applications en masse:

1. Run scanners against large portions of the Internet to look for common exploits, such as SQL injection, Remote Command Execution, etc. Virtually any poorly coded web application can be vulnerable to these attacks.
   
   
2. Follow the security feeds for newly discovered vulnerabilities, create exploits and launch them against every public instance of the application. Well known platforms like Wordpress and Drupal are especially susceptible to such an attack.

There is little debate that the best place to fix security issues is within the application code itself. However, that is not always feasible given the time that is required.

We first introduced malicious automation in Part I of this blog series. We shared how malicious automation is becoming a common element of the threat landscape for organizations in nearly every vertical. In Part II of this series, we want to dive into the top 4 types of malicious automation attacks that we see most often across our ThreatX customer base. They include:

Last year ThreatX announced enhanced bot detection and mitigation capabilities which enabled us to identify and stop malicious bots from accessing our customers’ applications. In this post we present a recent case where we have been able to use these features, namely active bot interrogation, to drastically reduce the volume of possible bot requests sent by suspicious source entities, reducing the number of useless or undesirable requests processed by the customer application and mitigating bot threats like credential stuffing, account takeover (ATO), and fraudulent transactions.

Application security never fails to keep us on our toes. Between the continuous evolution of application frameworks and integrations, and the advancement of human and automated attackers, security teams must always be braced for change and new challenges. On a similar vein, if the trends from 2018 continue, web application attacks will remain the most successful hacked area of the enterprise. In fact, over 60% of actual breaches occurred through web applications.^*