Biblio

The widespread adoption of eCommerce, iBanking, and eGovernment institutions has resulted in an exponential rise in the use of web applications. Due to a large number of users, web applications have become a prime target of cybercriminals who want to steal Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and disrupt business activities. Hence, there is a dire need to audit the websites and ensure information security. In this regard, several web vulnerability scanners are employed for vulnerability assessment of web applications but attacks are still increasing day by day. Therefore, a considerable amount of research has been carried out to measure the effectiveness and limitations of the publicly available web scanners. It is identified that most of the publicly available scanners possess weaknesses and do not generate desired results. In this paper, the evaluation of publicly available web vulnerability scanners is performed against the top ten OWASP11OWASP® The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an online community that produces comprehensive articles, documentation, methodologies, and tools in the arena of web and mobile security. vulnerabilities and their performance is measured on the precision of their results. Based on these results, we proposed an Integrated Multi-Agent Blackbox Security Assessment Tool (SAT) for the security assessment of web applications. Research has proved that the vulnerabilities assessment results of the SAT are more extensive and accurate.

Preventing the cyberattacks has been a concern for any organization. In this research, the authors propose a novel method to detect cyberattacks by monitoring and analyzing the network traffic. It was observed that the various log files that are created in the server does not contain all the relevant traces to detect a cyberattack. Hence, the HTTP traffic to the web server was analyzed to detect any potential cyberattacks. To validate the research, a web server was simulated using the Opensource Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA) and the cyberattacks were simulated as per the OWASP standards. A python program was scripted that captured the network traffic to the DVWA server. This traffic was analyzed in real-time by reading the various HTTP parameters viz., URLs, Get / Post methods and the dependencies. The results were found to be encouraging as all the simulated attacks in real-time could be successfully detected. This work can be used as a template by various organizations to prevent any insider threat by monitoring the internal HTTP traffic.