Can web developers hack

That is probably not too new to you, nor to anybody really. Then why are some employers hesitating to treat their developer teams, people working with that technology every day, with continuous training and update sessions? I was happy to read the results of a study that Statistics Belgium released last week see all the results here FR or here Dutch. The study finds that improvement is on its way.

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Content:

• Learn how to stay relevant, hack the hiring process, and make more money as a web developer.
• How To Start A Career In Ethical Hacking
• The 10 Best Programming Languages for Hacking
• Spectre attacks against websites still a serious threat, Google warns
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• 10 CSS Hacks Every Web Developer Should Know

Learn how to stay relevant, hack the hiring process, and make more money as a web developer.

Whenever you have resources exposed to the greater internet, those resources are going to be attacked in some way. Thankfully, half of the fight is just being aware of the threats against your API. Knowing that a threat exists and preparing your solutions ahead of time can negate the threat when it rears its ugly head. We often view our APIs in terms of developer experience — from start to end, how the average developer is going to experience the offering. They call the API in a reverse manner to discover weaknesses in the API that might otherwise be obscured during normal use.

To the user, and to the developer, the flow looks something akin to:. For someone reverse engineering the API, of course, this flow has some possible points for misuse. While the typical use flow may not expose this flaw, specific issues with the process might be easier to see when looking in reverse.

One solution to this problem is base level encryption. The main problem with this sort of defense is that an attacker can often pose as a trusted agent. One further solution is to change the way your URIs are actually structured. If a URI has coded information in the call, such as specific directory formats that expose where the resource lives and the organizational storage for related resources, then the URIs themselves could be giving away a ton of valuable information. Changing these to be less obvious can go a long way to negating such discovery.

Leveraging data learned from user behavior and aggregating this data can help identify outlier behavior. For instance, by tracking the average user interactions on your API, you can set a baseline that can help identify extreme deviations.

These systems can be paired with live obfuscation systems as well; routing traffic to a stated endpoint that randomly routes to a set of randomly named endpoints. This may help fight and deter these attacks, and when you combine this with heuristics-based detection , you can largely mitigate attacks. By separating these out into microservices , you can remove the threat vector to your normal services and heavily secure your major service points from these types of attacks.

In the context of an API, spoofing is when a party masquerades as someone they are not. Often, the attacker will attempt to portray themselves as a trusted user in order to pivot to additional users, allowing them free access to data and the ability to deal more damage without being readily discovered.

These attacks often use data discovered through phishing or other such credential leaks in order to prevent other alarms, such as those found in reverse engineering, from going off. Once the attacker has broached the system, the attack often attempts to inject some sort of privilege escalation attack by directing URI functions to other URIs as is the case in media encoding APIs , inserting code acting as text as in the case of translation APIs , or just flooding APIs with more data that it can handle, forcing an overflow failure.

In this type of attack, the attacker will pose as an element either in the chain of communication to the server, or the server itself. In this case, a user might be requesting a call using a resource located at API. Other times, the attack could show itself in the form of establishing a node between the user and the data requested.

If the resolution service is breached, then a secondary call could easily be added to the server function, automatically sending data received to an external service. Providers should note that this attack is often transparent — the attacker wants to appear as a valid part of the chain, and so it might still respond with the correct data, passing on the data to the API itself and responding with the response package. Advanced versions of this attack could see data changed mid-transfer, forcing your deposit to be placed in a different bank account, or your purchase to be shipped to a different address.

One solution to this problem is certificate pinning. Certificate pinning is basically setting up a pre-configured server certificate that is trusted by the API. Of course, this hinges upon trusting the certificate authority , and thereby assuming the authority is not part of the false loop.

That being said, demanding a very specific, pre-configured certificate makes it so that every single part of the chain would have to be corrupted in order for any detrimental spoofing to occur.

Another fix is encrypting all traffic in transit. You can also add salting to the data stream in order to make this data even harder to use. The problem here is that the data is still being captured, and the system is assuming that all encryption is going to stay in the current state.

History tells us of course that this is not reality, as major, strong encryption standards of yesteryear are now largely considered insecure.

You can also utilize services like two-factor authentication to prevent these types of attacks from the user perspective. If a user is required to use two-factor authentication, and a man-in-the-middle attack is attempting to be transparent, the calls will be separate from each other. Even if the calls are captured, they will be encrypted and separate — if you enforce session sanitation properly, this two-factor authentication will prevent significant damage from being done, and by the time it could theoretically be cracked, the transaction window will have long passed.

Session replays are specifically against websites and other systems that generate and store sessions. When sessions are part of the equation, this type of attack is designed to capture the session, and replay it to the server. In effect, the attacker is rewinding time and forcing the server to divulge data as if the same interaction is occurring once more.

If this is just a normal user session, the attack can be bad — if the session is from an administrator or elevated user, however, it could be catastrophic. Proper session management is the key here. Sessions and states in many applications serve the exact same purposes and open up the API to huge risk. If you have to use sessions, ensure those sessions are invalidated once you get past an idle timeout period or the user logs out. You can also set the session lifespan to terminate at a certain point, which will invalidate the session and prevent this type of attack.

You could also encrypt the session data if a session is required. Ensure that once a session is connected, some piece of encrypted code is used as a sort of token for that session. Without it, if the session is replayed in the future, it is essentially useless, as the token itself is what makes the session valid.

Social engineering is attacking not the machine code and the API itself, but the weakest element of all — the human element. Humans are fallible, and they can be tricked — often very easily. Social engineering takes advantage of this in a multitude of ways.

Phishing is the process of sending out mass contact to known users, often using cleverly crafted emails providing links to reset a password or validate a security incident. Spear phishing is much the same but focuses on one high-value target, often providing additional data, typically stolen in some sort of security incident, to instill trust in the user that the communication is indeed valid.

Once the attacker has access to these resources, they can commit any of the above attacks that much easier, and with a greater amount of success. The best method you can do to stop social engineering is to enforce API level security.

You can use opt-in heuristic systems to determine when a user is coming from an unknown machine, unknown location, or other variation in known behavior. You could absolutely use two-factor authentication in this case as well. Ultimately, API security is always going to be a game of cat and mouse. The solutions offered here are very much a starting point; a combination of these solutions will need to be put in place for any meaningful protection. Also keep in mind that this list is not exhaustive — there are as many ways to hack an API as there are hackers to utilize them.

Accordingly, your best bet is to simply be aware and be cognizant of your design choices. What do you think are the most common ways an API might be hacked? Do you think APIs face different types of threats than other online resources? Let us know below. Kristopher is a web developer and author who writes on security and business. He has been writing articles for Nordic APIs since High impact blog posts and eBooks on API business models, and tech advice.

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Kristopher Sandoval Kristopher is a web developer and author who writes on security and business. Simple Rules to Make Support Write Speak Sponsor.

How To Start A Career In Ethical Hacking

The problem with hackers attacking websites is on a constant rise. Month-to-month we list tens of vulnerabilities found in popular plugins that developers use on their sites. Most of these are being targeted by hackers. We monitor the sites we protect daily and see the number of attacks increasing every week. The reason why hackers are hacking websites is still a mystery for a lot of people.

The 10 Best Programming Languages for Hacking

Skip to content. Change Language. Related Articles. Table of Contents. Improve Article. Save Article. Like Article. Normally we hear he is a programmer, he is a developer and he is a hacker and he is a Computer scientist. But what is the difference between programmer, developer, hacker and a computer scientist? So In this article, I will try to distinguish between these words.

Spectre attacks against websites still a serious threat, Google warns

Recently, a team of security researchers from Positive Technologies found that as long as someone has the phone number associated with a Facebook account, they can actually take full control of the person's account. I tried emailing facebook support but they appear to be scam email addresses based on the responses I've gotten. Undoubtedly, even Spyine's own gathering can't see your private information. The personal information of about half a billion Facebook users, including their phone numbers, have been posted to a website used by hackers, cybersecurity experts say.

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Software engineers are capable of building up complex applications to make our lives easier. Depending on how safe engineers develop these kinds of solutions, applications are exposed to cybercrime. If software engineers can build applications, that infers they understand how software works behind the scenes. There are two different definitions of hacking. The most common definition for hacking refers to the activity of identifying vulnerabilities to break into a computer, a phone, an application system, or a network. However, that does mean all hacking is for illegal purposes.

10 CSS Hacks Every Web Developer Should Know

I started to learn web development a couple of months ago. At the time when I started, I didn't start because I wanted to become a better Hacker. I started out of a long-lasting curiosity. Coding always fascinated me, yet I always failed in my previous endeavors to learn to code. Maybe I choose the wrong language, maybe I started out of the wrong reasons, I can't tell for sure, but what I can tell is that I wasn't able to stick with it.

The language implementation is open-source , licensed under the MIT License. Hack allows programmers to use both dynamic typing and static typing. This kind of a type system is called gradual typing , which is also implemented in other programming languages such as ActionScript. Hack was introduced on March 20,

Chrome and Firefox will reach version in a couple of months. This has the potential to cause breakage on sites that rely on identifying the browser version to perform business logic. This post covers the timeline of events, the strategies that Chrome and Firefox are taking to mitigate the impact, and how you can help. The string is also accessible through JavaScript with navigator. Major version is a big milestone for both Chrome and Firefox.

A secure coding training platform where developers learn by actually exploiting and then fixing vulnerabilities in a web-based sandbox. Including offensive coding assignments in the training brings home the point that vulnerabilities can be very easy to overlook. Adaptive Training Plans are developed automatically based on that data to help developers close their secure coding skills gaps with highly relevant, targeted training materials. Developers can apply their learning right away in application sandboxes that are embedded within lessons. See how we can help transform your application security efforts with training that developers enjoy taking.

To build good defences against malicious attacks, you need a no-nonsense guide on how to protect website from hackers. How are we so confident? We know a thing or two about how to protect your website from hackers and other malicious attacks. TL;DR: The best security measure is to install a security plugin that runs on autopilot.