The work performed by Contrast Labs continuously improves the Contrast Security platform with support for new threats, attacks, vulnerabilities, and defenses. The team also exposes interesting analytics based on the data gathered by the Contrast Security platform. Finally, the Contrast Labs team is committed to the open source community and frequently publishes tools and research.
In February, overall application attack volume more than doubled. Once again this month there were no applications or APIs that were not attacked. The majority of the attack traffic originated in the United States.
This month saw continued dominance of injection attacks of all types (XSS, SQL, CMD, PATH, etc...) and added a significant rise in CSRF and Padding Oracle attacks. Attacks on CVEs slightly down in February.
In January, overall application attack volume just about doubled. Once again this month there were no applications or APIs that were not attacked. The United States dominated the attack landscape, with almost 2x the rest of the world combined.
Also, while there was modest growth in attacks on Struts CVEs, the search for zero-day vulnerabilities increased dramatically this month.
December was a huge month for application layer attacks, with large increases in a category of attack
The world of software is changing quickly at all of our clients. As we look across tens of thousands of applications and a wealth of vulnerability and attack data, some clear trends emerge. We continue to believe that organizations that move to DevSecOps will thrive against their competition. Here are some of our thoughts on the changing application security landscape for 2018:
Overall attack traffic was down in November from our highs in August. Once again this month, virtually every application/API was attacked, and some were continuously targeted across the month. We recorded hundreds of attackers from over 250 cities around the world.
Los Altos, Calif. – September 13, 2017 – It's hard to overstate what's happening here. The FBI, New York and Massachusetts Attorneys General, and Congress are now running inquiries into the Equifax breach. More will come. It's clear that the U.S. economy will change in some way as a result of this Struts 2 vulnerability. It may be macabre and indulgent, but you can’t help but speculate on the consequences:
Whatever happens, I hope the world recognizes this is a watershed moment for software application security.
Los Altos, Calif. – September 9, 2017 – Baird has confirmed that the underlying Equifax vulnerability was in Apache Struts. But there have been a number of vulnerabilities in Struts, including two extremely dangerous ones just this week. The rest of Baird’s analysis is nonsense, as these exploits allow a complete remote host take over, enabling the attacker to steal, corrupt, or delete anything in that database. Depending on the details, this could be serious negligence with regard to protecting SSNs and other PII.
In my mind, there are two Struts vulnerabilities that jump out as possibilities. The first is far more likely, but the second is a very remote possibility:
On Tuesday, September 5, 2017, a critical new Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability was disclosed against all previous versions of the Apache Struts 2 REST Plugin [1] available in those packages with Struts 2 between 2.0.0 and 2.5.12 (inclusive). The library uses XStream to deserialize HTTP input without any type enforcement, allowing attackers to specify unexpected types and cause arbitrary and malicious behavior.
Contrast Labs has done landmark research in deserialization flaws. In fact, the exploit for this issue is technically very similar to an exploit we released for CVE-2016-0792, a deserialization vulnerability against Jenkins we disclosed in 2016.
Contrast can protect against this vulnerability across the entire SDL, from early in development all the way through production. Simply adding the Contrast agent to your development, test, and production environments can quickly provide broad protection against this and other vulnerabilities.
Contrast Labs Releases State of Application Security: Libraries & Software Composition Analysis Report
This report highlights analytics gathered from within 1,857 running applications, which included several thousand different open source libraries, frameworks, and modules.
On Tuesday, users of Google Docs were targeted with an email phishing attack. The email content was a ruse to trick folks into granting access to their contact data. Google quickly put measures into place to stop the attack. Please visit this Google page to learn how to protect yourself >>
Even though Google put measures into place to prevent the attack, I did find a way to reproduce the phishing scheme this past Wednesday. I used Google's own developer platform to create a third-party app, and also called it “Google Docs.” The only difference is that I used a Cyrillic character, used in Russia, for the letter “o” in the app’s name.
On March 6, a new remote code execution vulnerability was disclosed1 against Struts 2 (2.3.5-2.3.31 and 2.5-2.5.10.) Most likely, if you're using Struts 2, you are vulnerable to a one-shot attack which can run arbitrary system commands.
On March 7, while everyone was busy frantically grepping through Vault7, a devastatingly simple exploit was released to packetstorm2. Rapid7 researcher Tom Sellers released a great honeypot analysis3showing weaponized mass exploitation late in the day Wednesday, March 8 coming from China.
Contrast Protect customers were able to defend their whole portfolio within hours of the first announcement using a Virtual Patch. We've also just released a new, more robust CVE Shield which allows customers to get code-level insights into this and any similar attacks.
Let’s talk about commons-httpclient-3.1.jar. I get asked about this library all the time. It’s an HTTP communication library. It has a vulnerability in it. It doesn’t handle SSL very well. In fact, it doesn’t really verify you are who the client…
If you’re running web applications on the Internet, then you’re almost certainly seeing probes for the Struts 2 vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638). These attacks started within hours of the vulnerability being released, and we continue to see widespread probes with dangerous payloads in the first request.
Contrast announced that Contrast Protect now supports
The java-buildpack
is a Cloud Foundry build pack for running JVM-based applications. It is designed to run many JVM-based applications (Grails, Groovy, Java Main, Play Framework, Spring Boot, and Servlet) with no additional configuration, but supports configuration of the standard components, and extension to add custom components.
A lightweight Java agent for preventing attacks against object deserialization like those discussed by @breenmachine and the original researchers @frohoff and @gebl, affecting WebLogic, JBoss, Jenkins and more.
Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? His pranks were "false alarms" - defined as "a mistaken or intentionally misleading alert that something is wrong and needs attention." False alarms from application security tools are certainly annoying, but how do they affect the overall economics of an application security program? As it turns out, they make all the difference.
Los Altos, Calif. – November 2, 2016 – Wix.com, a hosting provider which claims to host millions of websites, contains an XSS that leads to administrator account takeover and could be used to create a Wix website worm.
The project is part of the Contrast Openness Initiative that consists of an initial combination of our Open API Architecture and our Open Documentation Library.
This SDK gives you a quick start for programmatically accessing the Contrast REST API using Java.
This Maven plugin can be used to allow Contrast to discover vulnerabilities in your application during your integration or verification tests. The "install" goal of the plugin is used to download the agent to the /target directory. In order to use the agent, you should add the -
Sheepdog is a simple tool to generate normal and attack traffic for OWASP WebGoat. It can be used with security technologies like WAF and RASP in demonstrations and to verify that they are doing a tiny piece of what they are supposed to do. Sheepdog is not intended to be an exhaustive set of security tests. It has some basic SQL injection, XSS, path traversal, and that kind of thing...
We reject the old paradigm of periodic and serial scanning, hacking, and patching, which has proven expensive and ineffective. Instead, Continuous Application Security (CAS) relies on security instrumentation in every application. This instrumentation provides security visibility, assessment, and protection in real time and in parallel across the entire application portfolio.
A simple and lightweight migration tool for Apache Cassandra database that's based on Axel Fontaine's Flyway project. Cassandra Migration works just like Flyway. Plain CQL and Java based migrations are supported. The Java migration interface provides DataStax's Java Driver session.
ContrastDvnr 1.0: Utility for displaying information about the IIS Site and applications on the current machine. It creates a report file about the following:
By default results are written to report.xml file in XML format. JSON or text output format can be chosen instead. Output can also be written to another file or output to the screen.
This library provides a simple REST client for retrieving data from Contrast Team Server's REST API as plain old C# objects.
This library is also provided as a nuget package: https://www.nuget.org/packages/ContrastRestClient/.
This project will onboard a Gradle based web application to a TeamServer instance. Configuration values can be entered in a config.json file in the projects directory, or you will be prompted to enter the values during the vagrant up phase.
Repository for the Contrast Jenkins plugin. This plugin enables Jenkins builds to check the Contrast Teamserver and fail builds according to a set of configurable criteria.
I often get the question, “How well does your product handle iOS?” I’d like to explain why I think this question is a warning sign for an application security program.
An unfortunate part of my job is that sometimes I have to explain that people are focusing on the wrong objectives. Here’s my unfortunate dose of reality for today: We all need a perspective adjustment when it comes to “the client.” With Drumpf-
NOTE: Before you begin reading, you may want to visit this article for Act 1 of our series – Kryo serialization library and its weaknesses. This piece frames some of the discussion in this blog, but definitely isn’t required reading. XStream is a popular deserialization library. It’s used directly by many popular apps, like the build tool, Jenkins. It’s also used by other popular libraries, like Spring and Struts 2 for unmarshalling XML input into objects.
When @frohoff, @gebl and @breenmachine all combined to melt Java security (in what I’m hereafter conflating under the term “seriapalooza”), I thought about deserialization alternatives. Where are my customers going next? Is there greener grass? We’re going to find out. If the title of my series wasn’t spoiler enough, let me foreshadow more plainly: the grass is brown and dead, everywhere.
With all the talk about Java serialization vulnerabilities, I thought I'd share a new, open source tool I built for you to download and use, purposely designed to consume all the memory of a target that's deserializing objects -- eventually blowing it up. It’s called jinfinity. jinfinity exploits the fact that deserializers, like many parsers, follow very basic read-until-terminator patterns. jinfinity totally bypasses any of the protections discussed recently around untrusted deserialization.
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Contrast Security is the world’s leading provider of security technology that enables software applications to protect themselves against cyberattacks, heralding the new era of self-protecting software. Contrast's patented deep security instrumentation is the breakthrough technology that enables highly accurate assessment and always-on protection of an entire application portfolio, without disruptive scanning or expensive security experts. Only Contrast has sensors that work actively inside applications to uncover vulnerabilities, prevent data breaches, and secure the entire enterprise from development, to operations, to production.