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OWASP Automated Threats to Web Applications

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Automated Threats to Web Applications

Web applications are subjected to unwanted automated usage – day in, day out. Often these events relate to misuse of inherent valid functionality, rather than the attempted exploitation of unmitigated vulnerabilities. Also, excessive misuse is commonly mistakenly reported as application denial-of-service (DoS) like HTTP-flooding, when in fact the DoS is a side-effect instead of the primary intent. Some examples commonly referred to are:

  • Account enumeration
  • Click fraud
  • Comment spam
  • Content scraping
  • Data aggregation
  • Email address harvesting
  • Fake account creation
  • Password cracking
  • Payment card testing
  • Site crawling
  • Transaction automation

Frequently these have sector-specific names. Most of these problems seen regularly by web application owners are not listed in any OWASP Top Ten or other top issue list. Furthermore, they are not enumerated or defined adequately in existing dictionaries. These factors have contributed to inadequate visibility, and an inconsistency in naming such threats, with a consequent lack of clarity in attempts to address the issues.

Without sharing a common language between devops, architects, business owners, security engineers, purchasers and suppliers/vendors, everyone has to make extra effort to communicate clearly. Misunderstandings can be costly. The adverse impacts affect the privacy and security of individuals as well as the security of the applications and related system components.

Licensing

All the materials are free to use. They are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, so you can copy, distribute and transmit the work, and you can adapt it, and use it commercially, but all provided that you attribute the work and if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

© OWASP Foundation

What Is This?

Information and resources to help web application owners defend against automated threats

What Isn't It?

  • Another vulnerability list
  • Threat modelling
  • Attack trees
  • Non web
  • Non application

Project Objective

This project brings together research and analysis of real world automated attacks against web applications, to produce documentation to assist operators defend against these threats. Sector-specific guidance will be available.

Project Leader

Colin Watson

Contributors

Please help and your name can appear here. The project needs web application owner's threat information and reviewers.

Related Projects

News and Events

  • [20 May 2015] Meeting at project summit in Amsterdam
  • [27 Feb 2015] Work underway on the ontology

Classifications

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Work is currently underway on identifying automated threats to web applications, and determining the primary name used. This first part of the project intends to produce a consistent vocabulary for discussing the threats before moving onto other aspects.

Once the ontology is complete, the contributing weaknesses to each threat will be identified.

Once the ontology is complete, relevant mitigations and protective controls will be identified.

Automated Threats to Web Applications

Threat events to web applications undertaken using automated actions.

An attack that can be achieved without the web is out of scope.


Glossary

Action
An act taken against an asset by a threat agent. Requires first that contact occurs between the asset and threat agent (Ref 1)
Application
Software that performs a business process i.e. not system software (Ref 2)
Application layer
"Layer 7” in the OSI model (Ref 3) and “application layer” in the TCP/IP model (Ref 4)
Threat
Anything that is capable of acting in a manner resulting in harm to an asset and/or organization; for example, acts of God (weather, geological events, etc.); malicious actors; errors; failures (Ref 1)
Threat Agent
Any agent (e.g., object, substance, human, etc.) that is capable of acting against an asset in a manner that can result in harm (Ref 1)
Threat Event
Occurs when a threat agent acts against an asset (Ref 1)
Web
The World Wide Web (WWW, or simply Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) (Ref 5)
The first three specifications for Web technologies defined URLs, HTTP, and HTML (Ref 6)
Web application
An application delivered over the web


Glossary references:

  1. Risk Taxonomy, Technical Standard, The Open Group, 2009
  2. [NIST SP-800-37 “A software program hosted by an information system”, see NISTIR 7298 rev 2, NIST
  3. OSI model, Wikipedia
  4. TCP/IP model, Wikipedia
  5. Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One, W3C
  6. Help and FAQ, W3C

This page is in the process of creation

How do you define "web", "application" and "automated threat"?
See the definitions in the project's glossary.
What is an "ontology"?
Answer
Isn't this another bug (vulnerability) list?
Answer
I thought "XYZ" already did that?
Answer
How can I help?
Answer

Contributors

Colin Watson

The project's roadmap was updated in March 2015:

  • Feb-March 2015: Research on automated threats to web applications
  • April 2015: Application owner interviews and creation of initial project outputs
  • May 2015: Publication of outputs and request for review/data
  • Jun-Sep 2015: Gathering of additional contributions, updates to outputs, and translations.

Can you help? The project is looking for information on the prevalence and types of automated threats seen by web application owners in the real world. This will be used to refine and organise the information gathered from research papers, whitepapers, security reports and industry news. If you would like to find out more, or have knowledge to contribute, please contact, me directly or using the project's mailing list: