Web Attack Survival Guide

WHITE PAPER

Web Attack Survival Guide
What Is Your Worst Security Nightmare?
Receiving a “ransom note” with an ultimatum to pay millions of dollars or to watch
your company’s website buckle under a deluge of DDoS requests? Or opening an
ominous Google alert that reveals your company is the next target of a hacktivist
campaign? Or discovering the application framework that powers your website
is riddled with vulnerabilities—and learning it will take months to fix them?

What Do You Do When Your Worst Nightmare Becomes Reality?
The Web Attack Survival Guide describes today’s application threat landscape,
including the attack methods and tools used by hacktivists and cybercriminals.
It explains the processes and the technologies you can use to safeguard your
website from attack. It also helps you prioritize security efforts and it lists security
tips and tricks that you might otherwise have overlooked.
After reading the Web Attack Survival Guide, you will be able to confidently face
an impending web attack with a well-thought out strategy.

A Blueprint for Web Attack Survival
1
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3
4
5
6
7

Understand the Threat Actor
Develop a Security Response Plan
Locate and Assess Applications and Servers
Strengthen Application, Network, and End-Point Security Controls
Counter the Attack: Monitoring and Tuning Procedures When Under Attack
Bring in the Experts: Optional Security Consulting Services
Conduct a Post Mortem of the Attack

The State of Application Security
The Application Threat Landscape
74% of organizations received
a DDoS attack in the past year 1
86% of all websites have at
least one serious vulnerability 2
75% of all cyber-attacks target
web applications 3
33% of all websites had at least
one serious vulnerability every
day of the year in 2012 4

Web applications sit at the top of the list of hackers’ favorite attack targets. In fact, 75% of all
cyber-attacks target web applications. Most websites suffer dozens of attacks per day and
some sites sustain, on average, up to 26 attacks per minute.
While web attacks are not new—they have existed since the dawn of the Internet—one
attack trend is the emergence of hacktivism and prolonged attack campaigns.

Rise of Hacktivism
Hacktivism vaulted onto the scene and into the collective imagination in late 2010, with the
emergence of hacktivist groups like Anonymous, LulzSec, and Anti-Sec. Initially targeting
financial institutions, Anonymous and its imitators quickly moved on to dozens of other
government and business targets. Within two years, 58% of all data theft 5 was attributed
to hacktivist attacks.
In 2012, new players, like the Syrian Electronic Army, AnonGhost, and Iranian Cyber Army,
joined the party and launched a spree of attacks against U.S. banks and other western
targets. Many of these attacks combine traditional web attacks, like SQL injection and
cross‑site scripting, with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults. Hacktivist attacks
not only pose public relations disasters for the targeted companies, but many also result
in costly data breaches and prolonged website outages.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks Go Commercial
Besides the specter of hacktivism, organizations must contend with DDoS attacks
launched by competitors or cyber extortionists. These industrialized DDoS attacks can
be extraordinarily powerful—hundreds of times greater than typical bandwidth levels,
reaching over 300 Gbps or more. And DDoS attacks are becoming more advanced in order
to outwit conventional security controls. Instead of simply inundating targets with a flood
of TCP or UDP packets, many DDoS attacks now exploit application and database flaws.

Fighting Back

DDoS Attack Tools Used by Hacktivist
and Commercial DDoS Services

Every day, hackers unleash massive attack campaigns designed to take websites offline,
steal confidential data, and deface content. Fortunately, organizations can prepare for
and repel these attacks. Based on feedback from application security consultants and from
IT security personnel on the front lines of attack, this survival guide lays out a step-by-step
plan to fend off web threats.

1. “2012 Data Breach Investigations Report,” Verizon Business, 2012
2. “WhiteHat website Security Statistic Report,” WhiteHat Security, 12th Edition
3. Gartner Research
4. “State of Web Security,” Ponemon Institute
5. 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report,” Verizon Business, 2012

2

Web Attack Survival: Step-by-Step Strategy
Step 1. Understand the Threat Actor
To prepare for an attack, the first step is to understand the threat actor. What enemy do
you face? A well-known hacktivist group such as Anonymous or the Syrian Electronic Army?
A script kiddie? Industrialized cybercriminals? Research their attack techniques and identify
the tools that they use.

“ f you know your
I
enemies and know
yourself, you will
not be imperiled in
a hundred battles...
if you do not know
your enemies nor
yourself, you will be
imperiled in every
single battle.”
–Sun Tzu, The Art of War 6

Monitor Social Media
If hacktivists have threatened your organization, then track social media sites such as
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for updates about their attack methods and timelines.
Hacktivists may discuss vulnerabilities or weak points of your site.
Hacktivist groups will also disclose the types of DDoS attack tools that volunteer recruits
can use to attack your site. Armed with this information, you can create application security
signatures to easily block these attack tools.
With several recent attacks, hacktivists have published “booster packs” that configure
attack tools to exploit web vulnerabilities or URLs in the targeted websites. Be aware
of the contents of these booster packs, so you can implement policies to repulse them.
Profiling cybercriminals is more challenging than profiling hacktivists, simply because
cybercriminals do not advertise their methods or strategies. Unless you monitor hacker
forums, your best option is to talk to peers in your industry about attack sources, techniques,
and tools.7 Be sure to read hacker intelligence reports and security research that pertain
to your industry.

6. Although over-quoted, Sun Tzu’s suggestions—from preparation, to the art of deception, to battle tactics—are surprisingly
apropos for defending against web attacks.
7. Security information sharing and analysis organizations include National Council of ISACs, Financial Services ISAC,
SANS Internet Storm Center, and National Healthcare ISAC.

3

Step 2. Develop a Security Response Plan
CHANGE IS UNAVOIDABLE
Your incident response team may need
to apply security policies quickly
during an attack. Determine whether
you need to relax your internal approval
processes to ensure you can rapidly
adapt to changing attack vectors.

If your organization is the target of a specific attack campaign, like a DDoS attack or a
hacktivist attack, then you should organize an incident response team that will manage
security response efforts. The response team may potentially need to be available aroundthe-clock. Depending on the severity of the attack, assign 24x7 coverage to assure that
someone is available to respond to new threats, immediately.
The security response team will most likely be composed of IT security personnel, but may
include members from the networking and application development teams.

Red Team
Create a “red team”—a team of security engineers that will look for vulnerabilities that
attackers could exploit. The red team should evaluate all potential risks including,
application, network, end-user, social engineering, and even physical threats.

Your Little Black Book of Contacts
Prepare a contact list with the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of the following
groups:
1. IT security (including members of your security response team), IT operations, networking,
application development, database administration, legal, and executive management
2. DNS and Internet Service Providers
3. DDoS Protection Services
4. Relevant security specialists or consultants—for example, record the contact information
of field engineers at your web application firewall (WAF), Security Information and Event
Management (SIEM), and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) vendors. You may need to
enlist their help when you are under attack.
SECURITY TIP
DO: Keep your response plan
information, network diagrams, and
IP address schemes secure.
DON’T: Email your network architecture
and contact lists to the entire security
department or store them in a public
file share titled “Steal me first.”

4

Document Network and Server Information
Gather network and server information, including:
1. IP addresses of web servers, databases, DNS servers, network firewalls, web application
firewalls, database firewalls, and routers and switches
2. Disaster recovery IP addresses, if applicable
Also, prepare network architecture diagrams of all data centers at risk. If architecture
diagrams already exist, review them, and make sure they are up-to-date.

Notify Executive Management and Employees
When you know about an impending attack, inform your executive management team
about the threat and provide periodic status updates. In addition, you may need to warn
company employees of the attack. For DDoS attacks, notify all relevant users of potential
application or network downtime.
If your organization faces a hacktivist attack or a targeted attack, instruct users to update
any non-secure passwords and educate them about the risk of phishing attacks. Prepare
your IT personnel for social engineering threats. Ask them to verify any IT helpdesk and
password change requests.
Hackers may resort to physical attacks when necessary. Secure employee laptops, cables,
and network devices.

Establish a War Room
ASSIGN A “GENERAL” for the war
room. This person will be in charge
of all high-level security decisions
during the attack.

Designate a war room that will be “ground zero” for all planning and communications
during the web attack. The war room will be a centralized place to review security updates
and to strategize defense schemes. Choose a location to conduct security operations such
as an existing Security Operations Center (SOC), Network Operations Center (NOC), or even
a private conference room.

Step 3. Locate and Assess Servers and Applications
Even if you have documented your servers in network architecture diagrams, it is still
important to scan your network for rogue servers and applications. Application developers
or QA testers may have spun up new web applications or databases; other departments
may have deployed unsanctioned applications. Until you have scanned your network
and located all servers and applications, you cannot completely assess your risks.

Classify, Classify, Classify
Once you have located your applications and databases, determine which ones contain
sensitive data like Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Personal Healthcare Information
(PHI), credit card numbers, or intellectual property. Determine which applications are
needed for your business to function properly. Even if your corporate website does not
contain sensitive information, it may still be a top target for attack, because it is the most
visible to customers and partners.
Once you have identified your servers and applications and determined which are the
highest risk, prioritize your efforts on these assets.

5

Look at the Cloud
Digital assets today are not just limited to the devices on the physical network. Be sure to
locate third-party applications like CRM systems, intranet applications, email applications,
and internally developed websites that are hosted in the cloud. These applications may
contain confidential information. Hacktivists have targeted externally hosted applications
in the past, so it is essential to make sure these applications are secure.

Scan Your Network and Applications for Vulnerabilities
USE A COMBINATION OF DIFFERENT
SCANNERS to test your applications.
Each scanner may find unique
vulnerabilities.

One of the most important steps for fortifying your applications is to test them for
vulnerabilities. Scan your servers and networking devices for system vulnerabilities and
unpatched software. More importantly, scan your web applications using a purpose-built
web application scanner. Network scanners are a starting point, but only web application
scanners will uncover the application vulnerabilities that hackers are most likely to exploit.
Do not limit your assessments to your corporate website. Scan all of your applications,
including partner portals, CRM applications, extranets, and other potential attack targets.
All of these sites could be brought down by hackers and, therefore, damage your
company’s brand.

INCLUDE THE SAME TOOLS USED BY
HACKTIVISTS—such as the Havij SQL
injection tool and free application
scanners—in your scanning arsenal.

To prepare for an application DDoS attack, analyze the URLs in your applications that
connect to a backend database and could potentially be an attack target, such as the login,
registration, password change, or search pages. Submit application forms with characters
like wildcards to determine if they are susceptible to business logic exploits.
Once you have scanned your applications, fix identified vulnerabilities and rescan your
applications. If time constraints prevent you from fixing all vulnerabilities, then focus your
efforts on virtually patching critical vulnerabilities in your high-risk applications.

Assess Databases
Since sensitive data is typically stored in databases, verify these databases are secure by
scanning them for vulnerabilities and configuration flaws. Based on the assessment results,
determine if you need to apply any operating system or database security patches or any
configuration changes.
To strengthen the security of your database servers, delete default database user accounts
and disable unnecessary services like vulnerable database listeners. To fortify the underlying
server from attack, disable any unneeded services such as Telnet, FTP and rlogin.

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Step 4. Strengthen Application, Network, and End-Point Security Controls
After you have assessed and patched your applications and servers, you can ratchet up your
defenses. To thwart a web attack, you should apply stricter web application, network and
server-level security policies.

Protect Network Devices and Servers
To prevent network and server attacks:
• Enforce stringent network firewall and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) policies. Restrict
inbound traffic to your web application servers to necessary services like HTTP and HTTPS.
Configure IPS policies to block high and critical security violations.
• Install anti-virus or anti-malware software on your servers. Make sure virus, malware, and
spyware definition files are up-to-date.
• Configure your database firewall to virtually patch unpatched vulnerabilities. The database
firewall can also control access and block unauthorized queries to the database.

Lockdown Web Applications
WORK CLOSELY WITH APPLICATION
DEVELOPERS when enforcing stricter
profile policies. Developers can help
analyze the profile for accuracy. They
can also review security alerts to
ensure that your new, heightened
security controls did not block
legitimate requests.

Since the web application is the ultimate target of a web attack, organizations must focus their
efforts on tuning and testing their web application firewall to stave off an impending attack.
The following reflects a list of best practices to ensure your WAF will block all online threats.
• Review and tune the web application profile—also called the “white list” security model.
Confirm that the profile is accurate:
– Check for URLs or directories that have been removed from the website, but still appear
in the profile.
– Review acceptable characters and parameter value lengths in the profile and look for
irregularities in the profile.
– Compare the application profile to vulnerability scan results to make sure that all URLs
in assessment reports appear in the application profile and all URLs in the profile have
been assessed by the scanner.
– Tighten profile policies to block on white-list security violations like parameter values
with unauthorized characters such as brackets and question marks. Block excessively
long form field values to prevent buffer overflows and SQL injection attacks.
• Configure the WAF to enforce HTTP protocol compliance. Review and tune protocolrelated security policies like double encoding, extremely long URLs, and malformed
Apache URI messages. Enforcing HTTP protocol compliance, at least during the attack,
will foil evasion techniques, as well as buffer overflow and DoS exploits.
• Ensure that standard web application firewall policies such as SQL injection and crosssite scripting (XSS) are enabled. All high risk attacks, such as directory traversal, remote
file inclusion (RFI), local file inclusion (LFI,) and cross-site request forgery (CSRF), should
be blocked.

7

• Block malicious sources that have attacked other websites. Leverage intelligence from
the global community to stop malicious users and malicious attack strings used against
your peers.
• Web application firewalls can detect requests from common scanning and hacking tools
like Nikto, Paros, and Nessus based on header agent information. They can also block
scanning tools by detecting a frequent number of security violations in a short period
of time. To prevent attackers from uncovering vulnerabilities in your site, configure your
WAF to block scanners and website reconnaissance.
If your organization hosts customer-facing, partner, or extranet applications in the cloud,
ensure that these applications are protected by a WAF. Various solutions exist to safeguard
hosted applications, including Security as a Service (SaaS) and virtual appliance-based web
application firewalls.

Prevent Application DDoS Attacks
ALWAYS ON
Make sure you can manage all
of your security products from an
out-of-band network. Otherwise,
they may be unreachable when you
need them most—at the peak of a
DDoS attack.

Application-layer DDoS attacks, which account for over 25% of all DDoS attacks, are
designed to overwhelm application resources or exploit application vulnerabilities.
To stop application DDoS attacks, configure the following policies.
• Block high rates of requests in a short period of time by user, by IP address, and by
session. For this DDoS mitigation rule and many of the subsequent rules, configure
extended blocking policies—block the offending user for minutes or even hours after
the initial violation.
• Block users that download large amounts of data in a short period of time. In addition,
to prevent attackers from overwhelming server resources, block users that request
multiple files with extensions like “.pdf”, “.mp3”, “.mpg”, or “.mp4” in a short period of time.
• Block users that initiate multiple requests that cause extremely slow web server response
times. Such users may be exploiting business logic flaws in the application. In addition,
block users that perform multiple HTTP requests that result in web server errors, like 400,
405, or 503 error codes.
• Limit requests to high-risk URLs such as login pages and search pages. These pages are
frequent attack targets. To prevent DDoS attacks targeting login pages, create policies
that prevent:
A. An excessive number of failed logins
B. Multiple successful logins from the same user
• Many application DDoS attacks are launched by botnets. In addition, many attackers
attempt to cloak their identity by using anonymizing services. To stop these high-risk
sources, block known malicious IP addresses, anonymous proxies, and Tor networks.
• For hacktivist attacks, targeted organizations can monitor social media sites to learn which
DDoS tools will be used to conduct the attack. To develop laser-precise DDoS mitigation
policies, download the DDoS tool and test it. Look for unusual header or payload strings
that can be used to create custom attack signatures. Then define new policies in your
web application firewall to block these DDoS tools.

8

Use Cloud-Based DDoS Mitigation Services to Stop Network DDoS Threats
PREPARE!
To reduce the risk of downtime,
develop bot mitigation and rate
control policies before the attack
occurs. Then, enable and adjust the
policies when you are under attack.

To combat network-layer, or volumetric, DDoS attacks, your network must be able to handle
large volumes of traffic—to the tune of tens of gigabits, or even hundreds of gigabits, of
traffic per second. To avoid expensive infrastructure and Internet bandwidth costs, many
organizations rely on a cloud-based DDoS service to mitigate DDoS attacks.
Cloud DDoS mitigation services can scale on-demand to prevent massive attacks and
ensure that malicious traffic never reaches your network.
When evaluating DDoS mitigation services, consider the following capabilities:
• Can the service block both network and application DDoS attacks?
• Can the service accurately detect bots? Can it present various challenges like browser
checks and CAPTCHA tests to ensure that only malicious bots are blocked?
• Does the service support anycast DNS routing to ensure that its own DDoS filtering
datacenters aren’t targeted for attack?
• Does the service offer around-the-clock monitoring and tuning from security specialists?

Step 5. Counter the Attack: Monitoring and Tuning Procedures When Under Attack

“ repare for a cyberP
attack as you would
prepare for a hurricane.
Have a strategy, supplies,
and batten down the
hatches before the storm
starts. When it does start,
stay calm and focus on
protecting your most
important assets.”
–Cyber Security Expert in Florida

Once the web attack is underway, your security response team should devote all available
resources to monitor and manage the attack. For intense attacks, you may need to assign
shifts to ensure coverage at night and on weekends.
Your security response team should continuously review security alerts from your web
application firewalls.
• If attacks are coming from a specific geographic region, create policies to block requests
from that region, if it does not represent an important segment of your customer base.
• Analyze bot activity and determine which URLs bots are targeting. Create bot mitigation
rules that block bots from accessing those URLs.
• Look for attack patterns and tune policies to block those attacks. For example, if you
determine that hackers are attacking a search page, create a policy to block users if they
perform 10 search requests in a minute. Create a second policy to block users for 4 hours
if they perform 25 requests in 10 minutes. Make it challenging for hackers to recognize the
thresholds.
In addition to reviewing application security alerts and adjusting policies, monitor alerts
from other networking and security equipment.
• Review log messages from your database firewall; look for unusual activity indicative
of a breach.
• Analyze security alerts from network performance monitoring tools to detect bursts
of traffic or performance issues.
• Examine aggregated log messages from routers, switches, web servers, and network
security tools in your SIEM.

9

Continue reviewing social media, hacker forums, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) rooms, and
sites that catalog website defacements 8 for attack information or evidence that your site
has been penetrated. Hacktivists often use the phrase “#TangoDown” on IRC channels to
announce they have brought a website down.
Depending on the impact of the attack, it may be necessary to inform your organization’s
public relations and legal teams of any website outages or data breaches.

Step 6. Bring in the Experts: Optional Security Consulting Services
If you face an impending attack and you’re worried your organization might not have the
experience or the expertise to counter it efficiently, consider engaging outside consultants
to assist you through the process. Security consultants can help you prepare for an attack
by evaluating your application infrastructure for weaknesses. They can also review your
application defenses and help you fine-tune the policies of your security products, such
as your web application firewall.
Security consultants can act as an extension of your own security response team during
the attack, helping you monitor web attack traffic and adjust mitigation rules accordingly.
Based on their extensive experience defeating web attacks, they can help ensure that your
organization is well defended against any type of attack.

Step 7. Conduct a Post Mortem of the Attack
According to several interview sources, when the web attack is over, the first order of
business for your security response team will often be “to get a beer.” 9 After enduring a
stressful and prolonged web attack, your security engineers will need some time to recover.
However, once the dust has settled, your organization should conduct a post-mortem
of the attack.
As part of the post-mortem, review the impact of the attack. Analyze security reports from
your web application firewall to investigate attack trends. Examine alert logs from your
WAF, your SIEM, and your network monitoring tools.
Your post-mortem assessment should address the following questions:
• Did your network suffer any downtime during the attack?
• Did the attack affect application performance or latency?
• Was any sensitive data compromised?
• What security technologies and processes were in place? Were they effective?
• What improvements can be made in the future?
Once you have completed your post-mortem, you will be better prepared to tackle
future web attacks.

8. Zone-H lists recent of Website defacements at www.zone-h.org/archive.
9. Non-alcoholic beer and coffee are suitable alternatives.

10

Conclusions and Recommendations
Web attacks vary drastically. A script kiddie probing an online retailer for credit card
numbers uses starkly different attack methods than hacktivists trying to take down a
Fortune 50 banking site. Attack tools change over time—hackers develop new attack
tools to evade signature detection and outwit application developers. As a result, your
response will need to be flexible.
By including interviews with a number of security experts on the front lines of cyberwarfare—the consultants that help enterprises prepare for, and triage attacks every
day, and the security professionals that have locked down their own websites against
attack—this survival guide successfully covers a vast swath of today’s attacks. It provides
an excellent starting point for any organization facing an imminent attack.
Regardless of their motivation, most hackers target websites they deem potentially
vulnerable. Once they have exhausted their portfolio of attack techniques, they will
move on to the next potential victim. As a result, if organizations can make their websites
seemingly impenetrable to attack by implementing ironclad defenses such as real-time
attack blocking, anti-automation, multi-gigabit bandwidth elasticity, and session protection,
then hackers will move to easier prey.
By following the best practices outlined in the Web Attack Survival Guide, organizations
can fortify their websites against threats like hacktivist attacks, application DDoS, and
industrialized cyber-attacks.

11

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