Unfortunately, today's sophisticated web application threats have gained some advantages over typical WAFs: Favorable odds -- WAFs must correctly identify attacks 100% of the time, whereas attackers have the luxury of only needing to find a single bypass or evasion Temporary fixes -- Many WAFs use a "whack-a-mole" response tactic by only denying the individual attack request, allowing the attacker to make repeated attempts Persistence -- If left unimpeded, attackers may eventually find some type of payload obfuscation that minimizes detection effectiveness
The confluence of these advantages should concern WAF customers. Let's take a closer look at the typical web attacker methodology to see why.
The presence of public "over-the-top" DNS resolution alternatives is a strong motivator for internet service providers (ISPs) to invest in making their DNS resolution infrastructure the best that it can be. Resolvers are the glue that binds subscribers to their fixed and mobile broadband services.
By Gal Bitensky, Executive Summary Link scanners are a critical component in multiple classes of security products including email security suites, websites that suggest direct inspection of a suspicious link, and others. Behind the scenes, these services use web clients...
Today FireEye shared that they were victim of a cyberattack and internal red teaming tooling was accessed by adversaries. More details in this NYT article.
This reminded me that I wanted to do a post on actively protecting pen testers and pen testing assets for a while.
Against persistent adversaries it is only a matter of time when they succeed, not if they will succeed. The big question is do you know when an adversary starts poking around, and when they succeed?