9 out of 10 web apps are vulnerable to attacks
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 10 November 2009, 18:32 IST   |    1 Comments
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9 out of 10 web apps are vulnerable to attacks
Bangalore: The latest report by application security vendor Cenzic says that 9 out of 10 web applications have flaws that could lead to the exposure of sensitive information. The report 'Web Application Security Trends Report Q1-Q2, 2009' says that more than 3,100 vulnerabilities were identified in the first half of the year, 10 percent more than the number identified in the second half of 2008. Of the total vulnerability, 78 percent were web application vulnerabilities, lower than in the second half of 2008 but higher than in the first half of last year, reported the InformationWeek. The makers of the software affected by the top ten vulnerabilities include PHP, SAP, Sun, Citrix, Apache, F5 Networks, Symantec, and IBM. 90 percent of the web application vulnerabilities were in commercial web apps and eight percent were the browsers that run web apps, Cenzic's report says. SQL Injection and Cross Site Scripting vulnerabilities played a role in 25 percent and 17 percent of all web attacks, respectively. Cenzic's report claims that 87 percent of the analyzed web applications "had serious vulnerabilities that could potentially lead to the exposure of sensitive or confidential user information during transactions." In the second quarter of 2008, that number was 78 percent. The SANS Institute's Top Cyber Security Risks report, released in September, found that over 60 percent of attack attempts on the internet target web applications. In terms of browser vulnerabilities, Firefox and Safari led the pack, and Google Chrome was conspicuously absent. "Mozilla Firefox had the largest percentage at 44 percent," the report says. "What was surprising was that the Safari browser had a lot more vulnerabilities at 35 percent this time around mainly due to vulnerabilities reported in iPhone Safari. Internet Explorer was third at 15 percent and Opera with six percent of total browser vulnerabilities." In recent years, Mozilla's Firefox has tended to have a higher number of vulnerabilities than Internet Explorer, but Firefox bugs have been fixed more quickly than those affecting Internet Explorer. Thus, Mozilla has argued that the number of days that users were vulnerable represents a more useful security metric than a comparison of vulnerabilities. Mozilla's Johnathan Nightingale offered a comment along these lines via e-mail. "The Cenzic report seems to measure security by overall bug count, and we've been pretty vocal about why that's a flawed metric," he said. "We've even seen signs lately that Microsoft is coming around on the subject - in a recent interview Steve Lipner talked about not measuring the success of Microsoft's SDL by gross bug counts was refreshing to see." Nightingale adds that Cenzic's report puts much of the blame for browser bugs on plugin software, which Mozilla has been trying to improve through a recently launched plugin check service.

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