Want to See What A Live DDoS Attack Looks Like?

We’re fortunate enough to have had Andy Shoemaker, founder of NimbusDDoS, and our own Ofer Gayer chat about DDoS attacks and shed some light on the gaps in many people’s understanding of the threats out there. In a new BrightTALK webinar alongside Imperva Senior Product Manager, Ofer, Andy...

The AI’ker’s Guide to the (cybersecurity) Galaxy

As a security veteran I find myself from time to time having to explain to newbies the importance of adopting a ‘hacker’s way of thinking’, and the difference between hacker’s and builder’s thinking. If you can’t think like an attacker, how are you going to build solutions to defend against them?...

Configuring Imperva SecureSphere for GDPR Compliance: Part One

Time is running out. 23 days until GDPR enforcement The GDPR effective date is less than a month away and, given the significant risk and potential costs associated with a failure to comply, organizational readiness efforts continue to mount. GDPR non-compliance penalties can be severe up to 79...

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...

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...

Keeping Your WAF Relevant: Emergency Feed Pushes New Mitigations in Just Hours

We previously reported that the overall number of new web application vulnerabilities in 2017 showed a 212% increase from 2016’s 6,615 to a whopping 14,082. This spike was due, in part, to high-profile vulnerabilities like Heartbleed, Shellshock, POODLE, Apache Struts 2 and more recently, Meltdow...

Sonification of DDoS Attacks: Netflow Melodies and a Tomato Panic Button

A focus on innovation and creativity is ever-present in our work. One of the more prominent examples of that is our annual hackathon, which gives us a chance to fuel up on pizza and flex our coding muscles in a 24-hour programming marathon. Up until this year, these hackathons were limited to a...

Critical Actions to Finalize Your GDPR Compliance Program

Starting May 25, 2018, enforcement begins for the new EU General Data Protection Regulation GDPR and its heightened principles and requirements regarding data privacy, data processing, and data security. The newly revised regulation applies to organizations doing business in the European Union or...

Drupalgeddon 2.0: Are Hackers Slacking Off?

Ever since March 28th, when Drupal published a patch for a RCE named Drupalgeddon 2.0 SA-CORE-2018-002/CVE-2018-7600, Imperva has been monitoring our cloud looking for hackers’ attempts to exploit the vulnerability, but found nothing. Until today. It somehow seems fitting that nefarious activity...

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...

How to Tune Your Database Security to Protect Big Data

As digital information and data continues to accumulate worldwide, new big data solutions grow more and more popular. The introduction of IoT into our lifestyle, which turns appliances into smart data logging machines, along with organizations tracking behaviors for data science and research...

A Deep Dive into Database Attacks [Part IV]: Delivery and Execution of Malicious Executables through SQL Commands (MySQL)

In a previous post we covered different techniques for execution of SQL and OS commands through Microsoft SQL server that can be used for delivering and executing malicious payloads on the target system. In this post we’ll discuss the same topic for MySQL database. Creating an executable directly...

Streamline Compliance with SWIFT Customer Security Program Requirements

Transferring money from our bank accounts has never been easier than it is today. With a single click on our smartphones, we can transfer money from a bank account in New York to an account at a different bank in the Netherlands. This advancement is largely a result of the fluent communication...

DevOps-Ready WAF: Scaling Security for a More Agile Environment

With the maturation of DevOps, the growing concern around the security and compliance of more agile application development systems has made 2018 the year for DevSecOps. According to a study by Gartner, over 80% of development teams will have embedded DevSecOps by 2021. When evaluating how a WAF...

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...

Web Application Firewalls: The Definitive Primer

Firewalls have traditionally been focused on network layer traffic. As attacks have evolved, however, they have climbed the ladder of the Open Systems Interconnection OSI model. Web Application Firewalls WAFs have developed as a result, not only to track network traffic but also to understand...

Q4 2017 Global DDoS Threat Landscape Report

Today we are releasing our latest Global DDoS Threat Landscape Report, a statistical analysis of 5,055 network and application layer DDoS attacks mitigated by Imperva Incapsula services during Q4 2017. In Q4, the number of application layer attacks nearly doubled, just as the number of network...

Data Security Solutions for GDPR Compliance

Enforcement of the new EU General Data Protection Regulation GDPR adopted in 2016 starts on May 25, 2018. It requires all organizations that do any business in the EU or that collect or process personal data originating in the EU to comply with the regulation. Organizations that do not have a...

A Deep Dive into Database Attacks [Part III]: Why Scarlett Johansson’s Picture Got My Postgres Database to Start Mining Monero

As part of Imperva’s efforts to protect our customers’ data, we have an ongoing research project focused on analyzing and sharing different attack methods on databases. If you aren’t familiar with this project, which we call StickyDB, please read Part I and Part II. There we explain this database...

RDaaS Security: How to Apply Database Audit and Monitoring Controls

As you move databases to cloud database platforms, data security and compliance requirements move along with it. This article explains how you can apply database audit and monitoring controls when migrating your database to cloud services, including the following: Introduction to RDaaS Benefits o...

RedisWannaMine Unveiled: New Cryptojacking Attack Powered by Redis and NSA Exploits

Recently cryptojacking attacks have been spreading like wildfire. At Imperva we have witnessed it firsthand and even concluded that these attacks hold roughly 90% of all remote code execution attacks in web applications. Having said that, all of the attacks we have seen so far, were somewhat...

2018 Cyberthreat Defense Report: Where IT Security Is Going

What keeps you awake at night? We asked IT security professionals the same question and found that these issues are top of mind: malware and spear phishing, securing mobile devices, employee security awareness and new technologies that detect threats capable of bypassing traditional signature-bas...

Hunting for Insider Threats: Using Activity Modeling to Detect Suspicious Database Commands and Access Patterns

The Widening Gap Data breaches by insiders are very challenging to catch. The gap between the rise of insider threats and speed of hunting them down is increasingly widening. According to 2017 Data Breach Investigation Report by Verizon, a great majority of insider and privileged-misuse breaches ...

Securing Healthcare Data and Applications

The healthcare industry is quickly growing as a sweet spot for hackers to steal large amounts of patient records for profit. The US Department of Health and Human Services breach tool reports over 340 data breaches in 2017 impacting more than 3 million individuals, and 176.5 million individuals...

Inside a New DDoS Amplification Attack Vector via Memcached Servers

We recently saw a new DDoS amplification attack vector via memcached servers that culminated in two massive DDoS amplification attacks on February 28. Both attacks were mitigated successfully. Here’s how memchached servers work and how the attacks unfolded. Memcached servers Unless updated within...

New 10 Second SLA For Rapid DDoS Mitigation

Two months ago, we updated the Imperva Incapsula SLA service level agreement to guarantee network and application layer DDoS attack mitigation in under 10 seconds. This commitment sets a new standard for time to mitigation TTM, made possible by improvements to our DDoS mitigation technology and...

4 Steps to Monitor and Audit Privileged Users of Data Stores

Changing regulatory requirements for protection and privacy of data and increasing numbers of data breaches are driving a greater focus on data protection. Understanding who is accessing critical data, what was accessed and when it was accessed is a critical component of strong security operation...

A Deep Dive into Database Attacks [Part II]: Delivery and Execution of Malicious Executables through SQL commands (SQL Server)

An organization’s database servers are frequently the prime target of attackers. We recently started a new research project we named StickyDB to learn more about database hacking, primarily to understand common database attacks, tools and techniques engaged by attackers. To conduct this research,...

NEW: Vulnerability and Assessment Scanning for Your AWS Cloud Databases

Scuba is a free and easy-to-use tool that uncovers hidden security risks. Scuba is frequently updated with content from Imperva’s Defense Center researchers. With Scuba you can: Scan enterprise databases for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations Identify risks to your databases Get recommendation...

NetRefer Chooses Imperva Incapsula WAF: A Case Study

Since 2005, companies have been using NetRefer’s performance marketing software to fully automate their affiliate programs. From enrollment through customer relationship management CRM, tracking, finance and rewards management and payments, NetRefer’s Unified Performance Marketing Platform...

New Research: Crypto-mining Drives Almost 90% of All Remote Code Execution Attacks

It’s early in 2018 and we have already witnessed one of the top contenders in this year’s web application attacks. Continuing the trend from the last months of 2017, crypto-mining malware is quickly becoming attackers’ favorite modus operandi. In December 2017, 88 percent of all remote code...

Integrate Your Ticketing System into Database Security to Prevent DBA Privilege Abuse

Many of the recent high-profile data security breaches were made by trusted insiders. They are often database administrators DBAs who are highly privileged and trusted insiders with access to sensitive data. In this blog post, I will discuss the inherent risk introduced by highly privileged...

A Deep Dive into Database Attacks [Part I]: SQL Obfuscation

Today, data breaches are a threat to every organization. According to a report from Risk Based Security covering the first half of 2017, over 6 billion records were exposed through 2,227 publicly-disclosed data breaches. The number of exposed records is already higher than the previous all-time...

One GRC Manager’s Practical Approach to GDPR Readiness

With about four months to go before the GDPR becomes effective many companies are still struggling with where to start. You’re not alone. According to this survey, the majority of companies are slow off the mark. On top of that, companies require resources and budget to prepare for and comply wit...

CVE-2018-6389 WordPress Parameter Resource Consumption Remote DoS

Yesterday Monday, February 5, 2018, a zero-day vulnerability in WordPress core was disclosed, which allows an attacker to perform a denial of service DoS attack against a vulnerable application. The vulnerability exists in the modules used to load JS and CSS files. These modules were designed to...

GDPR and Breach Detection: How to Ask the Right Questions to Meet the GDPR Breach Notification Rule

It is now less than four months before the General Data Protection Regulation GDPR becomes effective. This new data regulation of the European Union is designed to provide individuals with rights and protections over their personal data collected by business around the world. It aims to unify dat...

2017 OWASP Top 10: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Since its founding in 2001, the Open Web Application Security Project OWASP has become a leading resource for online security best practices. In particular, its list of the top 10 “Most Critical Web Application Security Risks” is a de facto application security standard. The recently released 201...

Survey: APIs a Growing Cybersecurity Risk

Like a lot of people, your mobile phone number is probably easily accessible to anyone with a bit of searching. Imagine if someone could take this number and your name and gain access to your mobile phone account including billing, email address and phone IMSI. Or maybe someone hacked into one of...

Cloud Migration Checklist for Application and Data Security

In the final post of our series on cloud migration, we’ve put together a list of strategic and immediate considerations as you plan to migrate your business to the cloud. From a high-altitude viewpoint, cloud security is based on a model of “shared responsibility” in which the concern for securit...

Improve the ROI of Your Database Protection Investment

When an organization considers switching a mission-critical compliance or security system from one vendor’s solution to another it’s a very big decision. There is expense involved in acquiring the new solution, it will take time and money to deploy and retrain staff, and it will take careful...

Deserialization Attacks Surge Motivated by Illegal Crypto-mining

Imperva’s research group is constantly monitoring new web application vulnerabilities. In doing so, we’ve noticed at least four major insecure deserialization vulnerabilities that were published in the past year. Our analysis shows that, in the past three months, the number of deserialization...

Cloud Migration: Technical and Business Considerations

If you’re like many businesses, you’re moving applications into public and private cloud infrastructures. You’ve seen how the cloud’s agility, resiliency, and scalability drives business growth. Fortunately, rolling out new apps in the cloud is easy when you have containers, microservices, and...

Security Strategies for DevOps, APIs, Containers and Microservices

More and more IT professionals see DevSecOps, a practice which integrates security measures earlier in the development process to improve production code quality, as a mainstay for future application development. Much of this stems from the growing trend towards speeding up application developmen...

Five Cloud Migration Strategies for Applications

Regardless of your current IT environment or your vision for migrating to the cloud, numerous strategies exist that can accommodate your cloud-migration approach. Fortunately, this range of options allows you to proceed with caution while making progress toward your ultimate objective. Always kee...

Cloud Database Migration Peer Insights [Study]

Not long ago, for security, compliance or other reasons, it was unthinkable for many regulated organizations to move sensitive data into the cloud. It’s striking how things have changed. Maybe it was inevitable that services like email were cloud migration candidates. People trust Microsoft, and...

Cloud Migration Fundamentals

The advantages offered by a cloud-based environment make it an easy decision for most companies to make. Still, there are numerous critical choices to be made that can transform the complexities of the migration process into a relatively smooth transition—especially regarding application and data...

Our Analysis of 1,019 Phishing Kits

In recent years phishing activity has grown rapidly, with thousands of phishing sites popping for a virtual moment that last weeks, days or even hours, before becoming ineffective—either getting blacklisted by security providers, or brought down by internet providers and authorities, or in most...

Three Reasons Why GDPR Encourages Pseudonymization

The General Data Protection Regulation GDPR is the European Union’s new data regulation designed to provide individuals with rights and protections over their personal data that is collected or created by businesses or government entities. It unifies data protection regulation across all member...

The State of Web Application Vulnerabilities in 2017

As a web application firewall provider, part of our job at Imperva is constantly monitoring new security vulnerabilities. To do this, we use internal software that collects information from various data sources such as vulnerability databases, newsletters, forums, social media and more, integrate...

Women in Tech and Career Spotlight: Jerusalem Bicha

We conclude our series featuring women in tech at Imperva with an interview with Jerusalem Bicha, network operations team lead at Imperva. We talked about her path to a career in cybersecurity. Tell us how you got into cybersecurity. JB: I actually don’t have a degree. My career in cybersecurity...