Top 10 Web Application Security Threats to Look Out For in 2024
Build secure web applications in 2024 by keeping an eye out for these 10 threats!
Introduction
A lot of what we have known before has changed drastically because of the many innovations that took center stage during 2023; with some of these significant changes, the threat landscape has also taken a turn where some of the old threats have reduced and some new threats have risen.
Technology will keep changing every single day and this can be marked as the one constant when we talk about technology and the associated threats. With threat actors focusing their efforts on getting a big payday, their techniques have grown into unimaginable proportions and therefore having an idea of what is to come will help you prepare yourself and make sure that you or your company doesn’t make the news headlines for the wrong reasons.
Increased Sophistication of Attacks
It’s 2024 and your traditional businesses are going obsolete, these businesses are unable to keep up with the demand of consumers who want ease of purchase through a digital portal rather than visiting a physical store.
These demands require businesses to turn to technology to put their entire operations online; but without the knowledge required to secure their digital footprint, they will likely be targeted and exploited by attackers.
If you think that your business is small and attackers are only interested in targeting large corporations, then you’re gravely mistaken since attackers do not discriminate and will go after any possible opening within your armor. A survey conducted in 2023 by ASBN shows that 73% out of the 551 small business owners surveyed have encountered a cyberattack within the year.
Learning From The Past: OWASP Top 10
Before jumping into what is to be expected, we need to make sure that we are prepared and have closed down all the gaps to the threats that are already known, and what better way to go through these threats than looking at the OWASP Top 10 list of threats!
This list consists of the prominent threat vectors for web applications that needs to be looked at when you’re designing a web application. By ensuring that all the areas mentioned within this list are addressed, you can be assured that you have successfully patched most of the prominent attack vectors for an attacker to exploit.
Nowadays mostly all web applications contain and communicate via APIs. This technique allows for a seamless method of connecting and integrating different systems with a common stream. Let’s not forget that APIs are also targeted by attackers due to their vast use and limited security features that are usually implemented.
OWASP also introduced a new set of threats that are specific to APIs in 2023. By ensuring that your APIs are following these standards and have all the necessary threats addressed, you can ensure that your APIs are also being looked after.
What Security Threats To Look Out For In 2024?
Now that we’ve looked at the prominent threats in 2023, let’s look into the threats that can take precedence in 2024 and some of the potential impacts that they may have.
1. Supply Chain Attacks
There have been a couple of noteworthy supply chain attacks that happened over the years such as the one conducted using Kaseya to deploy Ransomware. In each of these cases, the innocent-looking supply chain of corporations was targeted to infiltrate them.
With the many advancements in the security of web applications, cyber attackers are now focusing their efforts on infiltrating the supply chains of web applications and corporations since some supply chains may not be as well secured as their customers.
Therefore it is crucial that organizations conduct proper due diligence and audits and enforce secure benchmarks that must be adhered to by the vendors to ensure that there are no gaps within their cyber posture that’ll allow attacks to break in.
2. API Abuse
We have already spoken about APIs and their significance to the world of web applications. The steady increase in the number of API-based attacks seen in 2023 can only mean that it will keep increasing in 2024.
With the significance of securing APIs having to be at the top of any organization’s list, a good place to start would be to address the threats highlighted within the OWASP API Security Top 10–2023. This should give you a good understanding of the persistent threats towards API and some mitigative controls that you can implement.
3. Serverless Function Hijacking
Serverless computing has seen a significant boom and increase in popularity due to its cost-saving and ease of use. However, due to its cloud service provider-specific controls and configurations, it may be difficult for developers to secure these functions and their code running web applications.
These functions must be secured according to a standard framework that is provided by the cloud service provider or by running security benchmarks against the serverless services that you may be running. Misconfigurations within these services can potentially grant attackers access to any resource that is permitted within the access policies of these services leading to many widespread attacks compromising the rest of the services running within your organizations.
4. Automated Bot Attacks
There have been serious issues caused by automated bots where they mimic human behavior to trick various web applications into accepting invalid or fraudulent input. This has been a persisting issue throughout the years and it doesn’t look like it’ll stop anytime soon due to the vast amount of web applications that still lack automated bot detection and protection controls.
One popular mechanism is to implement a Captcha mechanism such as Google’s reCAPTCHA to present the users or in this case, automated bots a challenge that technically only humans can pass! This has been a proven mechanism to combat the problems that automated bots have caused.
5. Open-Source Library Vulnerabilities
Developers always use open-source libraries to stop themselves from reinventing the wheel, which cuts down on the development time since the functions that these developers need would have been developed into an open-source library by someone else.
You must have used countless open-source libraries when developing web applications, but, have you asked yourself if these libraries are safe to use? Are they updated? Are there any vulnerabilities within these libraries? Are these maintained regularly?
These are all very good questions that you need to ask yourself when using these open-source libraries since a single exploitable vulnerability within a library will render your web application vulnerable.
Trends show that attackers target widely used libraries such as Log4J to exploit and compromise millions of web applications. The significance behind this type of threat is that sometimes the developers or system administrators may not even know what libraries are being used within web applications.
Therefore these libraries must be put into a separate inventory and maintained, where proper vulnerability assessments and updates are implemented.
6. Zero-Day Attacks
Zero-day vulnerabilities lay dormant within web components, applications, or even the hardware until an attacker discovers them and uses these weaknesses to compromise the web application and potentially any connected systems.
The popularity of zero-day attacks has grown significantly due to the availability of these zero-day exploits on dark web marketplaces where attackers can pay to obtain these exploits!
Most zero-day attacks are targeted at web components or applications that are used by millions of organizations due to their widespread usage which allows the attackers to impact the largest number of organizations.
There’s only a limited amount of controls that you can take to keep yourself safe from these Zero-Day attacks since sometimes you won’t even know about it until it’s too late. One of the easiest actions that you can take is to stay up to date with the cyberspace and any disclosures of these zero-day vulnerabilities; where you would need to patch the vulnerable component immediately if you find yourself to be vulnerable.
7. DDoS Attacks
We have seen a significant increase of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks take place over the years with a steady increase in the capabilities and the risk that these attacks pose.
We have seen the largest DDoS attack that was recorded in 2023 with a staggering scale of 398 million requests per second; that’s 398 requests aimed at your web application! With large-scale botnets being used by attackers and some even up for sale for anyone to purchase there is no saying how far these attacks will evolve in 2024.
8. Insider Threats
Until now we have focused on the attacks that can happen from external attackers, but we haven’t forgotten about the attacks that can happen from within an organization!
These attacks have shown a steady increase due to high levels of disgruntled employees or even employees who decide that they want to make some extra money by compromising web applications.
The only way that you will be able to combat these insider threats is by enforcing adequate security monitoring, approval processes, and reviews. These controls aim to bring governance to the existing processes where a single employee or entity cannot make significant changes without prior approvals.
9. Security Misconfiguration
Security misconfigurations have always been an issue for a very long time, even up to the point where it is highlighted within the OWASP Top 10! This is still a major issue since developers and administrators don’t seem to look at securing the many components that go into building a web application.
They may secure one aspect but forget or neglect the rest of the components due to various reasons. However proper practices in place to validate the security configurations of a web application can reduce the chances of security misconfigurations being exposed in the production environments where they will have significant damages.
10. AI-Driven Attacks
With all that has been happening in the space of Artificial Intelligence, we have seen so many advancements in technology that allow for benefits. However, if the past has proven this over and over again, where there is new technology being used for good, there will always be someone to use it for evil!
We have seen glimpses of AI being used for malicious attacks such as DeepFake being used to manipulate voice, videos, and images or even generative AI used for creating malicious phishing emails or even malware.
With these types of advancements and attackers using AI to launch attacks, it is only a matter of time before we will see a different breed of cyberattacks on web applications that we will not have seen before.
There is no real answer to these types of attacks since we haven’t seen how far attackers will take AI and use it against large corporations and any web-based applications. Therefore I can say that the future of attacks that are AI-Driven is yet to reveal its ugly head and we have only seen the start of a revolution!
Conclusion
With all that we have gone through, we need to understand that the cyberspace is evolving all the time and we may see some of these attacks sooner than later! Therefore the best way of protecting our web applications will be to keep ourselves up to date and to switch from a traditional reactive method to a proactive method where we can take steps to harden our controls even before an attack takes place.
2024 will bring about a brand new set of attacks and threat vectors that we haven’t seen before, but we will also continue to see most of the attacks that have seen throughout 2023.
There’s a lot that the future has in store for the cyber community in 2024; let’s all try to navigate these threats safely.
I hope you have found this helpful.
Thank you for reading!
