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Web Server Application Attacks Essay

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Running Head: Web Server Application Attacks

Web Server Application Attacks

Assignment # 1

Mariz Cebron

Common web application vulnerabilities and attacks, and recommend mitigation strategies The World Wide Web has evolved into a critical delivery pipeline for institutions to interact with customers, partners and employees. Via browsers, people use web sites to send and receive information via Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) messages to web applications housed on web servers. This information, expected as legitimate messages, can be used illegitimately in unauthorized ways to compromise security vulnerabilities a.) Authentication - one of the biggest …show more content…

These attacks usually put a heavy load on the target by making regular requests very rapidly. It is hard to distinguish if a web server is stormed by thousands of clients, or if there is a DoS attack in progress. A simple way to force the problem of heavy load is to use a server farm together with a load balancer. This will help against small attacks, but not against a DDoS started from several hundred hosts. Furthermore, increasing the number of servers is rather expensive.
Attack on the Justice Department’s Web site
An apparent denial of service attack, which overloads a site’s servers with requests for access, crippled portions of www.Justice.gov[->0]. Its site was experiencing “a significant increase in activity, resulting in degradation in service,” and officials said they would treat the situation “as a malicious act until we can fully identify the root cause of the disruption.” A loosely affiliated group of hackers known as Anonymous said the attack was in response to DOJ’s decision to shut down Megaupload.com[->1] on charges that the popular Web site illegally shared movies, television shows and e-books. Members of the Anonymous faction release the following video regarding the attack, along with a brief statement, neither of which details the motivation for this latest attack on the DoJ or the contents of the data the attack exposed. Anonymous members launched a

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