Synack’s Top 5 Vulnerabilities Found in 2022
IT and Cybersecurity leaders need the clearest picture of their networks and assets to understand if their organizations are at risk and what to do about it. When it comes to looking ahead at zero day vulnerabilities, it can be helpful for leaders to first look back to understand the collective strengths and weaknesses of the cybersecurity industry and the effects they’ve had on the different risks and threats it’s tasked with analyzing and preventing.
As a helpful tool for 2023 strategic cybersecurity planning, we’re highlighting the most common vulnerability categories found in 2022, across more than 27,000 discovered vulnerabilities by the Synack Red Team. Each of these vulnerabilities have the potential to pose significant threats to large organizations and will continue to be monitored as we move through the year.
Here are the top five vulnerability categories found by Synack in 2022:
#1 Authorization Permission
The most common vulnerability found in 2022 relates to improper authorizations. With authorizations, a user’s right to “access a given resource [is] based on the user’s privileges and any permissions or other access-control specifications that apply to the resource.” In this case, unauthorized users may gain access to resources or initiate unwanted actions that they should not be allowed to perform, potentially leading to data exposures, DoS or arbitrary code execution.
#2 Cross Site Request Forgery
The runner up vulnerability is Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF), which is an attack that forces an end user to execute unwanted actions on a web application in which they’re currently authenticated. With a little help of social engineering (such as sending a link via email or chat), an attacker may trick the users of a web application into executing actions of the attacker’s choosing. If the victim is a normal user, a successful CSRF attack can force the user to perform state changing requests like transferring funds, changing their email address and so forth. If the victim is an administrative account, CSRF can compromise the entire web application.
#3 Information Disclosure
Information Disclosure can occur due to security mistakes which expose sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information. Information exposures can occur in different ways, resulting from mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer or cleanse sensitive information.
#4 SQL Injection
This attack style consists of insertion or injection of a SQL query via the input data from client to application. A successful exploit of this style can read and even modify sensitive data, execute admin functions (including shutting down systems), and in some cases, issue commands to an operating system.
#5 Authentication Session Management
Broken Authentication Session Management vulnerabilities round out the Top 5 found by Synack in 2022. Websites may require users to login using a username and password, MFA or other authentication schemes, which may contain exploitable vulnerabilities. The site will assign and send each logged in visitor a unique session ID that serves as a key to the user’s identity on the server, if the session ID is not properly secured a cybercriminal can impersonate a valid user and access that user’s account.
How to Reduce Your Exposure to a Top 5 Vulnerability
Synack offers an offensive security testing platform allowing enterprise customers to track exploitable vulnerabilities in their environment and to close security gaps before they can be exploited by bad actors. The Synack Platform pairs the Synack Red Team, a community of 1,500 expert and vetted adversarial researchers, with the machine intelligence in our platform. Synack’s security testing missions cover web assets and host assets, as well as mobile, cloud and API security.
If you’re not penetration testing on a continuous basis, you should be. Talk to your Synack rep or your authorized security sales representative to learn more about strategic security testing.
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