Thanks to Mastercard’s long annual leave (we have 25 days!) I took a two week trip to Egypt earlier this month to visit a place I have always wanted to see: the burial tombs of the ancient pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings. As a security engineer, I could not help looking at these…
Read more
This post is a response to a friend who is seeking a cybersecurity role in an extremely challenging market. Given that this is a widespread issue these days, I decided to write a post rather than simply leaving a comment. Various statistics from multiple sources suggest that there is a wide gap in cybersecurity roles,…
Read more
My first encounter with the world of cyber-criminals occurred through a watering hole attack campaign many years ago. I visited a Persian website and discovered that it was downloading malware onto visitors’ browsers. I promptly contacted the site administrator, who informed me that they had no technical knowledge of the issue. It became apparent that…
Read more
I have heard this many times over the course of the last several years: someone is experiencing a heavy DDoS attack on their website. When I ask them what type of attack they are experiencing, the answer is usually that the bad guys are sending them thousands or even millions of POST requests. When I…
Read more
DDoS (distributed denial of service) and DoS (denial of service) attacks can be broadly classified into three categories based on the layers of the OSI model they target: network layer (Layer 3), transport layer (Layer 4), and application layer (Layer 7). Layer 3 and Layer 4 attacks are typically less complex–even though that they might…
Read more
The web application firewall (WAF) is a security tool used to guard against unwanted access to web applications. It is often a security device that sits on top of a web server and guards against threats from the internet or from beyond the network perimeter. Unlike Layer 3 (Network) and Layer 4 (Transport) firewalls, which…
Read more
Canvas fingerprinting, and Zombie cookie trackers are nothing new; however, these methods are improved and have become notoriously effective over the time. Recently, a study revealed that one in every four 10,000 most visited websites on the internet uses canvas fingerprinting to track the visitors with up to 99.9% accuracy. The tracking attempt to collect…
Read more
For many years, I zealously have used Suhosin with any implementations of PHP5 on Apache2 or PHP-FPM Nginx webservers to defend against SQL injection and other common web attacks. In fact, PHP5 was so disastrous, both in terms of its core security, and its functions and modules that I could have never conceived using it…
Read more
