top 10 website security threats

One of the most infamous SQL Injection (SQLi) attacks was the 2011 Sony PlayStation Network (PSN) breach, where hackers exploited a vulnerability to gain unauthorized access to over 77 million user accounts. By injecting malicious SQL code into a web form or URL, they tricked Sony's database into executing unintended commands, exposing personal data such as names, emails, addresses, and potentially credit card information. As a result, Sony was forced to shut down the network for 23 days, faced lawsuits, and suffered an estimated $171 million in losses. This attack highlighted the critical need for prepared statements, input validation, and web application firewalls to prevent SQLi vulnerabilities.

One notable Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attack occurred in 2014 against eBay, when attackers exploited a vulnerability in the site's search function. By injecting malicious JavaScript into search results, they tricked users into clicking on fake product listings, which then stole their login credentials and redirected them to phishing sites. Because the script was executed within eBay's trusted domain, victims had no reason to suspect foul play. The attack persisted for weeks before being addressed, highlighting the dangers of poor input sanitization and the importance of escaping user input, using Content Security Policy (CSP), and implementing HTTP-only cookies to prevent XSS exploits.

One of the most devastating Remote Code Execution (RCE) attacks was the 2017 Equifax data breach, caused by an unpatched vulnerability in Apache Struts, a web application framework. Hackers exploited this flaw to execute arbitrary commands on Equifax's servers, gaining access to sensitive data of 147 million people, including Social Security numbers, birth dates, and financial details. The breach went undetected for months, leading to severe financial and reputational damage. This attack underscored the importance of timely software updates, strict access controls, and Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) to prevent RCE vulnerabilities.

One of the most massive Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks occurred in 2016 against Dyn, a major DNS provider. Hackers used the Mirai botnet, which hijacked thousands of insecure IoT devices like routers and cameras, to flood Dyn's servers with overwhelming traffic. This caused major disruptions to popular websites including Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, and PayPal, making them inaccessible for hours. The attack highlighted the dangers of poor IoT security, emphasizing the need for strong passwords, regular firmware updates, and DDoS mitigation strategies like rate limiting and traffic filtering to defend against such large-scale attacks.

One notable Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attack occurred in 2008 against Gmail, where security researchers demonstrated how attackers could force users to change their email forwarding settings without their consent. By tricking victims into clicking a malicious link while logged into Gmail, the attack sent an unauthorized request to Gmail's servers, altering the user's email settings to forward all incoming messages to the attacker. This exploit highlighted the importance of CSRF tokens, SameSite cookie attributes, and user authentication safeguards, which help prevent unauthorized actions on behalf of authenticated users.

One of the most infamous Zero-Day Exploit attacks was the 2010 Stuxnet worm, which targeted Iran's nuclear facilities. Stuxnet exploited multiple unknown vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows and Siemens industrial control systems, allowing it to silently spread across networks and sabotage uranium enrichment centrifuges by altering their speeds. Discovered only after significant damage had been done, Stuxnet demonstrated the power of zero-day exploits in cyber warfare. This attack emphasized the need for proactive security measures, frequent system patching, network segmentation, and behavior-based threat detection to mitigate the risks of unknown vulnerabilities.

One notable Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack occurred in 2015, known as the Superfish incident, where Lenovo pre-installed adware on its laptops that used a compromised self-signed root certificate. This allowed attackers to intercept and decrypt HTTPS traffic, making users vulnerable to password theft, data interception, and phishing attacks on supposedly secure websites. Since the Superfish software used the same weak certificate across all affected devices, hackers could easily exploit it to perform MitM attacks. This incident highlighted the dangers of untrusted pre-installed software, emphasizing the need for strong encryption, certificate validation, and secure HTTPS implementations to prevent MitM vulnerabilities.

One well-known Brute Force Attack occurred in 2012 against Dropbox, when hackers used stolen employee credentials to gain access to a document containing user email addresses. They then launched a brute-force attack to crack weak passwords and gain access to multiple user accounts. As a result, Dropbox was forced to enhance its security measures, including implementing two-factor authentication (2FA) and automated detection of suspicious login attempts. This attack underscored the importance of strong, unique passwords, account lockout mechanisms, and multi-factor authentication to defend against brute-force attacks.

One major Insecure Deserialization attack occurred in 2017, targeting Apache Struts, the same vulnerability that led to the Equifax breach. Attackers exploited a flaw in how Struts handled serialized data, allowing them to craft malicious payloads that, when deserialized by the server, enabled Remote Code Execution (RCE). This allowed hackers to execute arbitrary commands, ultimately compromising sensitive systems. The attack highlighted the dangers of trusting user-supplied serialized data, emphasizing the need for input validation, disabling unnecessary deserialization, and using safer data formats like JSON instead of binary serialization to mitigate such risks.

A well-known server security misconfiguration attack occurred in 2017 with the AWS S3 bucket leak. Several companies inadvertently exposed sensitive data due to misconfigured Amazon S3 buckets, leaving them publicly accessible. This included personal data, credit card information, and internal documents, as the permissions were not correctly set to restrict access. Attackers exploited this misconfiguration, and some companies suffered significant data breaches. This incident highlighted the critical importance of proper access control configurations, least privilege access, and regularly auditing cloud storage and server settings to prevent such security misconfigurations from exposing sensitive data.