OWASP Automated Threats to Web Applications

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Automated Threats to Web Applications
Web applications are subjected to unwanted automated usage – day in, day out. Often these events relate to misuse of inherent valid functionality, rather than the attempted exploitation of unmitigated vulnerabilities. Also, excessive misuse is commonly mistakenly reported as application denial-of-service (DoS) like HTTP-flooding, when in fact the DoS is a side-effect instead of the primary intent. Some examples commonly referred to are:


 * Account enumeration
 * Click fraud
 * Comment spam
 * Content scraping
 * Data aggregation
 * Email address harvesting
 * Fake account creation
 * Password cracking
 * Payment card testing
 * Site crawling
 * Transaction automation

Frequently these have sector-specific names. Most of these problems seen regularly by web application owners are not listed in any OWASP Top Ten or other top issue list. Furthermore, they are not enumerated or defined adequately in existing dictionaries. These factors have contributed to inadequate visibility, and an inconsistency in naming such threats, with a consequent lack of clarity in attempts to address the issues.

Without sharing a common language between devops, architects, business owners, security engineers, purchasers and suppliers/vendors, everyone has to make extra effort to communicate clearly. Misunderstandings can be costly. The adverse impacts affect the privacy and security of individuals as well as the security of the applications and related system components.

Licensing
All the materials are free to use. They are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, so you can copy, distribute and transmit the work, and you can adapt it, and use it commercially, but all provided that you attribute the work and if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

&copy; OWASP Foundation


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What Is This?
Information and resources to help web application owners defend against automated threats

What Isn't It?

 * Another vulnerability list
 * Threat modelling
 * Attack trees
 * Non web
 * Non application

Project Objective
This project brings together research and analysis of real world automated attacks against web applications, to produce documentation to assist operators defend against these threats. Sector-specific guidance will be available.

Project Leader
[mailto:colin.watson@owasp.org Colin Watson]

Contributors
Please help and your name can appear here. The project needs web application owner's threat information and reviewers.

Related Projects

 * OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set Project
 * OWASP AppSensor Project


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News and Events

 * [20 May 2015] Meeting at project summit in Amsterdam
 * [27 Feb 2015] Work underway on the ontology

Classifications

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=Ontology=

Work is currently underway on identifying automated threats to web applications, and determining the primary name used. This first part of the project intends to produce a consistent vocabulary for discussing the threats before moving onto other aspects.

=Weaknesses=

Once the ontology is complete, the contributing weaknesses to each threat will be identified.

=Mitigations and Protective Controls=

Once the ontology is complete, relevant mitigations and protective controls will be identified.

= Bibliography =

=FAQs=

This page is in the process of creation


 * How do you define "web"?
 * Answer


 * How do you define "application"?
 * Answer


 * How do you define "automated threat"?
 * Answer


 * What is an "ontology"?
 * Answer


 * Isn't this another bug (vulnerability) list?
 * Answer


 * I thought "XYZ" already did that?
 * Answer


 * How can I help?
 * Answer

= Acknowledgements =

Contributors
[mailto:colin.watson@owasp.org Colin Watson]

= Road Map and Getting Involved =

The project's roadmap was updated in March 2015:


 * Feb-March 2015: Research on automated threats to web applications
 * April 2015: Application owner interviews and creation of initial project outputs
 * May 2015: Publication of outputs and request for review/data
 * Jun-Sep 2015: Gathering of additional contributions, updates to outputs, and translations.

Can you help? The project is looking for information on the prevalence and types of automated threats seen by web application owners in the real world. This will be used to refine and organise the information gathered from research papers, whitepapers, security reports and industry news. If you would like to find out more, or have knowledge to contribute, please contact, me directly or using the project's mailing list:


 * [mailto:colin.watson@owasp.org Colin Watson]
 * (awaiting project mailing list to be set up)