Articles Tagged ‘Attack’

Detect Brute-Force Attacks with nChronos Network Security Forensic Analysis Tool

colasoft-nchronos-brute-force-attack-detection-1 Brute-force attacks are commonly known attack methods by which hackers try to get access to restricted accounts and data using an exhaustive list/database of usernames and passwords. Brute-force attacks can be used, in theory, against almost any encrypted data.

When it comes to user accounts (web based or system based), the first sign of a brute-force attack is when we see multiple attempts to login to an account, therefore allowing us to detect a brute-force attack by analyzing packets that contain such events. We’ll show you how Colasoft’s nChronos can be used to identify brute-force attacks, and obtain valuable information that can help discover the identity of the attacker plus more.

For an attacker to obtain access to a user account on a website via brute force, he is required to use the site’s login page, causing an alarming amount of login attempts from his IP address. nChronos is capable of capturing such events and triggering a transaction alarm, warning system administrators of brute-force attacks and when the triggering condition was met.

Visit our Network Protocol Analyzer Section for high-quality technical articles covering Wireshark topics, detecting and creating different type of network attacks plus many more great security articles.

Creating a Transaction Analysis & Alarm in nChronos

First, we need to create a transaction analysis to specify the pattern/behavior we are interested in monitoring:

From the nChronos main page, first select the server/IP address we want to monitor from the Server Explorer section.

Next, from the Link Properties, go to the Application section and then the Analysis Settings as shown below:

Security News

This section contains articles covering IT Security news from around the world.

Understanding SQL Injection Attacks & How They Work. Identify SQL Injection Code & PHP Caveats

SQL Injections have been keeping security experts busy for over a decade now as they continue to be one of the most common type of attacks against webservers, websites and web application servers. In this article, we explain what a SQL injection is, show you SQL injection examples and analyse how these type of attacks manage to exploit web applications and webservers, providing hackers access to sensitive data.

Additional interesting Web Hacking and Web Security content:

What is a SQL Injection?

Websites operate typically with two sides to them: the frontend and backend. The frontend is the element we see, the rendered HTML, images, and so forth. On the backend however, there are layers upon layers of systems rendering the elements for the frontend. One such layer, the database, most commonly uses a database language called SQL, or Structured Query Language. This standardized language provides a logical, human-readable sentence to perform definition, manipulation, or control instructions on relational data in tabular form. The problem, however, is while this provides a structure for human readability, it also opens up a major problem for security.

Typically, when data is provided from the frontend to the backend of a website – e.g. an HTML form with username and password fields – this data is inserted into the sentence of a SQL query. This is because rather than assign that data to some object or via a set() function, the data has to be concatenated into the middle of a string. As if you were printing out a concatenated string of debug text and a variable’s value, SQL queries work in much the same way. The problem, however, is because the database server, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, must be able to lexically analyse and understand the sentence’s grammar and parse variable=value definitions. There must exist certain specific requirements, such as wrapping string values in quotes. A SQL injection vulnerability, therefore, is where unsanitized frontend data, such as quotation marks, can disrupt the intended sentence of a SQL query.