Cyberattack on Swedish Gambling Site During Eurovision Highlights Strategic Threats

Every year, the Eurovision Song Contest captivates millions of viewers across Europe and beyond, turning a simple music competition into a cultural phenomenon. This popularity extends to various forms of betting, with numerous gambling sites offering odds on Eurovision outcomes. Eurovision has...

CVE-2023-3519: NetScaler (Citrix) RCE Blocked By Imperva

On July 20, CISA warned about the exploitation of an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability affecting NetScaler formerly Citrix Application Delivery Controller and NetScaler Gateway. Attackers first exploited this vulnerability in June, when unidentified hackers used this as a zero-d...

Google Chrome “SymStealer” Vulnerability: How to Protect Your Files from Being Stolen

The Imperva Red Team recently disclosed a vulnerability, dubbed CVE-2022-3656, affecting over 2.5 billion users of Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. This vulnerability allowed for the theft of sensitive files, such as crypto wallets and cloud provider credentials. Introduction Chrome is...

Back to Basics: Let’s Forget About the GDPR… For A Moment

At this point it’s fairly safe to assume that most everyone in the business of “data” has heard of the European Union EU-wide General Data Protection Regulation GDPR that was signed into law in late April 2016; with the compliance deadline having come into effect on May 25, 2018. Clearly, this ne...

Episode 2: Behind the Scenes of a Tailor-Made Massive Phishing Campaign Part 2

Executive Summary Last summer, we investigated a massive, global phishing campaign impersonating almost 350 legitimate companies. Our continued investigation into this expansive phishing campaign revealed leaked backend source code, shedding light on the infrastructure behind the operation. This...

Atlassian CVE-2023-22515 Blocked by Imperva

Atlassian, an Australian software company, has released emergency security updates to address a severe zero-day vulnerability in its Confluence Data Center and Server software. This vulnerability is actively being exploited, allowing attackers to create unauthorized Confluence administrator...

The 5 Core Principles of the Zero-Trust Cybersecurity Model

When even the US Government concludes that to ensure baseline security practices are in place and to realize the security benefits of cloud-based infrastructure while mitigating associated risks, they must migrate to a zero-trust model, every organization should be actively moving in that...

Anomaly Detection at Scale Using SQL and Facebook’s Prophet Forecasting Algorithm

Anomaly detection is a very important task. At Imperva we use it for threat hunting, risk analysis, risk mitigation, trends detection and more. In a previous post we showed how it can be done in a simple method by SQL. This time we wanted to use Prophet, which is an algorithm for forecasting time...

Modern Database Security Buys Down More Risks for Enterprises

Pop quiz: how many data records are lost or stolen on an average day? 1 million? 3 million? 6 million? If you answered 6 million, you’re correct, according to the Breach Level Index. According to the Index, 14.7 billion records have been lost or stolen since 2013, or more than 2.2 billion per yea...

Mapping Communication Between Facebook Accounts Using a Browser-Based Side Channel Attack

A now-patched vulnerability in the web version of Facebook Messenger allowed any website to expose who you have been messaging with. In a previous post, I showed how your Facebook likes, location history, and other metadata could have been extracted from your Facebook account using a side-channel...

Patched Facebook Vulnerability Could Have Exposed Private Information About You and Your Friends

In a previous blog we highlighted a vulnerability in Chrome that allowed bad actors to steal Facebook users’ personal information; and, while digging around for bugs, thought it prudent to see if there were any more loopholes that bad actors might be able to exploit. What popped up was a bug that...

Need for Speed: Optimizing Data Masking Performance and Providing Secure Data for DevOps Users

Let’s start with a pretty common life experience -- you identify a need e.g., transportation, you evaluate your options e.g., evaluate car manufacturers, various features, pricing, etc., and you decide to purchase e.g., vehicle X. This process repeats itself over and over again regardless of the...

Latest Research Reveals Rise in API Attacks in 2023, Putting Businesses at Risk in 2024

The State of API Security in 2024 Report highlights how APIs and their increased usage are significantly changing the threat landscape. In 2023, the number of API-targeted attacks rose significantly. Attacks targeting the business logic of APIs constituted 27% of attacks in 2023, a growth of 10%...

Imperva recognized as a Strong Performer in Forrester Wave: Data Security Platforms, Q1 2023

The Forrester Wave evaluated the largest end-to-end providers of data security capabilities across a wide range of functionality to enable controls to enforce data security policies for both structured and unstructured data. In this report, Forrester provides an assessment of the top vendors in t...

Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing. Where to Begin.

Looking at the employment landscape, it’s clear that prospects for landing cybersecurity positions are excellent and on the rise, but what about the commercial viability of that “grey side-gig”, ethical hacking and penetration testing? While the notion of “being bad to help the good people” is...

Brace yourselves: Holiday shopping season is coming

The E-commerce market has seen tremendous revenue growth during the pandemic. Along with that good news for E-business, there has been an increase in fraudulent activities online that may cost retailers over $20 billion in losses by the end of 2021. According to eMarketer, worldwide retail...

JavaScript Fraud: More Than Just Magecart and Skimming

The global pandemic has driven a sharp rise in online traffic that provides fertile ground for attackers to execute a growing number of more sophisticated client-side attacks. For example, Magecart-style attacks are used to steal sensitive information by skimming data either through a first-party...

WordPress Arbitrary File Deletion Vulnerability Plugged With Patch 4.9.7

On Jun 26 an arbitrary file deletion vulnerability in the WordPress core was publicly disclosed, the vulnerability could allow an authenticated attacker to delete any file and in some cases execute arbitrary code. WordPress is a free, popular, and open-source content management system currently...

Three Telltale Signs a Hacker Has Been in Your Account

Imperva’s latest Hacker Intelligence Initiative HII report, Beyond Takeover - Stories from a Hacked Account, was just released. With this research, we set forth to learn about the dynamics of phishing attacks from the victim’s perspective and shed some light on attacker practices. Our intent was ...

Cloud WAAPs Are the Future of Application Security. But What Does That Mean?

Millions of Verizon FIOS broadband users vulnerable to hackers controlling and surveilling their home networks. Thousands of GPS watches whose maps were open to attackers tracking and eavesdropping on children and elderly users. A zero-day hole in Microsoft’s Edge and Internet Explorer browsers...

The Challenges of DIY Botnet Detection – and How to Overcome Them

Botnets have been around for over two decades, and with the rise of the Internet of Things IoT they have spread further to devices no one imagined they would - printers, webcams, and even toasters and fridges. Some botnets enlist infected devices to mine cryptocurrency or steal passwords from oth...

A Bug in Chrome Gives Bad Actors License to Play ‘20 Questions’ with Your Private Data

In a 2013 interview with The Telegraph, Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google was quoted as saying: “You have to fight for your privacy or lose it.” Five years later, with the ‘Cambridge Analytica’ data breach scandal fresh in our memory, Eric Schmidt’s statement rings as a self-evident truth. Similar...

Drupalgeddon3: Third Critical Flaw Discovered

For the third time in the last 30 days, Drupal site owners are forced to patch their installations. As the Drupal team noted a few days ago, new versions of the Drupal CMS were released, to patch one more critical RCE vulnerability affecting Drupal 7 and 8 core. The vulnerability, code-named...

Imperva releases its Global DDoS Threat Landscape Report 2023

The 2023 Imperva Global DDoS Threat Landscape Report reviews DDoS attack activity throughout 2022, provides insights into the year’s most noteworthy DDoS events, and offers recommendations for the year ahead. While the report focuses mainly on research data from the application and network DDoS...

Deployment Isn’t the Final Step – Monitoring Machine Learning Models in Production

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last decade, you’ve probably heard of the concept of a machine learning system at least once in your life. Whether it’s auto-translation, auto-completion, face or voice recognition, recommendation systems or autonomous driving, AI-based systems can be...

Not just for Processing: How Kafka Streams as a Distributed Database Boosted our Reliability and Reduced Maintenance

The Apache Kafka Streams library is used by enterprises around the world to perform distributed stream processing on top of Apache Kafka. One aspect of this framework that is less talked about is its ability to store local state, derived from stream processing. In this blog post we describe how w...

Explainer Series: What is Clickjacking?

Here we go, another online trap ready to ensnare unsuspecting – well, until now anyway – users. As if Phishing, Cryptojacking, credential stuffing and old school scamming wasn’t enough, folks really just can’t catch a break these days. Anyway, we’re here to chat about clickjacking, for those of y...

Onwards and Upwards: Our GDPR Journey and Looking Ahead

At Imperva, our world revolves around data security, data protection, and data privacy. From our newest recruits to the most seasoned members of the executive team, we believe that customer privacy is key. For the better part of the last two years, Imperva has laid the foundation for our complian...

Encryption: Pros and Cons

The expression “when you are a hammer, everything is a nail” has a curious background. The concept belongs to a generalized law of the instrument which is a cognitive bias that occurs by being overly familiar with certain tools, and the likelihood of force-fitting problems to the tools at hand. A...

Imperva Protects Against Critical Apache OFBiz Vulnerability (CVE-2024-45195)

Recently, a critical vulnerability in the widely used Apache OFBiz framework was disclosed, designated CVE-2024-45195. This vulnerability allows for unauthenticated remote code execution RCE, making it an especially dangerous flaw for organizations using OFBiz in their business operations. An...

Imperva Adds Active Attack Detection to its Data Security Platform

Protecting the data perimeter Organizations are in constant pursuit of technology that provides rapid insight into threats. Early visibility, in combination with context-rich alerting and efficient incident response workflows, streamline threat containment and remediation efforts. Identifying...

A security architect’s POV on a mature data-centric security program, Part 2

In part one of this series, we explored the challenges associated with accessing and searching long-term retained database activity logs, and identifying sensitive customer data to comply with stricter compliance regulations. In this post, you’ll see through a security architect’s eyes the...

How to leverage accountability to ensure sustainable enterprise data security

As post-pandemic economic recovery continues to drive rapid acceleration in digital transformation, documented data breaches and service disruptions caused by cybercriminal activity have become an unwelcome part of our daily news feed. In spite of the regulations and compliance requirements that...

Infographic: What Are Bad Bots Doing?

By now, anyone with even a passing interest in how the Web functions has heard of bots. Most people understand that there are good and bad bots. Legitimate bots like Googlebot, an application used by Google to crawl the Internet and index it for search, and others like it represent tremendous...

Advanced Bot Protection integrated into Imperva’s Cloud Application Security

Today, Imperva announced the general availability of Advanced Bot Protection that now fully integrates the industry-leading bot protection technology into its Cloud Application Security platform. By integrating Advanced Bot Protection this enables true defense-in-depth security by delivering bot...

Your Business is Compliant with Data Security Regulations. It’s Still not Safe.

There has been plenty of discussion about the impact of global data regulations on data security practices. Particularly with the implementation of the EU’s GDPR last year, organizations in every industry have been scrambling to develop new security practices to avoid fines and the associated bad...

Static vs Dynamic Data Masking: Why Are We Still Comparing the Two?

Earlier this month a leading analyst released their annual report on the state of Data Masking as a component of the overall Data Security sector; which included commentary on what’s known as ‘static’ data masking and an alternative solution known as ‘dynamic’ data masking. And these two solution...

Watch: An Account Takeover Attack Using Credential Stuffing, and How to Protect Against It [Video]

As cryptocurrencies continue to grow in diversity, so too do the threats they face, specifically those targeting the cryptocurrency exchange. Now, more than ever, cryptocurrency exchanges are facing security threats in the form of volumetric and application layer DDoS and account takeover ATO...

A WordPress SPAMbot Wants You to Bet on the 2018 FIFA World Cup

Our researchers recently picked up on a spike in SPAM activity directed at sites powered by WordPress, which, naturally, led them to take a closer look. Turns out the attack was launched by a botnet and implemented in the form of comment SPAM - meaningless, generic text generated from a template...

The Catch 22 of Base64: Attacker Dilemma from a Defender Point of View

Web application threats come in different shapes and sizes. These threats mostly stem from web application vulnerabilities, published daily by the vendors themselves or by third-party researchers, followed by vigilant attackers exploiting them. To cover their tracks and increase their attack...

Securing Modern Web Applications: Threats and Types of Attacks

Web Application Firewalls are the most advanced firewall capabilities available to IT teams. Deploying the appropriate WAF is important, especially these days when the security threat landscape is changing so rapidly. In a previous post, we introduced Web Application Firewalls: Securing Modern We...

Dynamic Application Profiling: What It Is and Why You Want Your WAF to Have It

Because web applications are unique, they have distinct structures and dynamics, and – unfortunately – different vulnerabilities. A web application security device, therefore, must understand the structure and usage of the protected applications. Depending on the complexity of the protected...

Five Key Takeaways from the 2024 Imperva Bad Bot Report

Bad bots continue to affect consumers and organizations across all sectors. For over eleven years, Imperva has been dedicated to helping organizations manage and mitigate the threat of bad bots. We’ve published the 2024 Imperva Bad Bot Report as part of our commitment to helping organizations...

Imperva successfully defends against CVE-2024-25600 in WordPress Bricks Builder

A critical vulnerability in the Bricks Builder site builder for WordPress, identified as CVE-2024-25600, is currently under active exploitation, and poses a significant threat to over 25,000 sites. This flaw, with a CVSS score of 9.8, is an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability that...

A Leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAF, Six Years Running

Gartner has published its 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls WAF and Imperva has been named a Leader for the sixth consecutive year! Along with our WAF Gateways and easy-to-deploy Cloud WAF we recently added API Security, RASP, Account Takeover Protection, Bot Management, a...

Microsoft and Imperva Collaboration Bolsters Data Compliance and Security Capabilities

This article explains how Imperva SecureSphere V13.2 has leveraged the latest Microsoft EventHub enhancements to help customers maintain compliance and security controls as regulated or sensitive data is migrated to Azure SQL database instances. Database as a Service Benefits Platform as a Servic...

Making the Grade: Achieve SSL Labs A+ Grade with Imperva WAF

We all woke up to a new reality early last year. HTTPS adoption has reached the tipping point, meaning that more than half of web traffic is encrypted. The benefits of encrypting your traffic are obvious, right? It’s essentially about you securing data being transmitted by authenticating web...

The Evolution of Cybercrime and What It Means for Data Security

Cybercrime is now an industry unto itself. And, just as any industry evolves, so does the cybercrime industry. This industry is built upon enterprise data. Granted, there is a ready underworld supply chain and market for vulnerabilities, attack kits, botnets, APTs, phishing-as-a-service,...

GDPR Readiness – Calculate Your Return on Security Investment (ROSI)

What is the cost of a data breach? Assuming annual revenue of £30M, a single fine could be as much as a whopping £1.2M—the maximum 4%—when the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation GDPR becomes effective in May 2018. Compare that to a database control cost factor of £750K, the cost ...

How Cache Purge Helps Keep Your Website Content Fresh and Responsive

Content Delivery Networks CDNs accelerate web traffic across the internet through servers residing in strategic locations known as points of presence or PoPs across the globe. Each PoP has a number of caching servers, each of which contains a cached version of your website or application. By...