Web applications have been seeing an ever-growing rise in their usage. With the increasing use of the internet, more and more organizations are shifting their day-to-day office work to the web applications that help establish a connect between the different offices located in different geographies. But these advantages come with their own costs in terms of security.

The security of web applications has been a challenging domain due to the sheer amount of ways an attack can take place over a web application. So, let's take a look at the ones plaguing the security of web applications:

• SQL Injections: One of the common attacks with web applications that are backed by SQL databases is the use of SQL Injections. In these attacks, an attacker usually crafts a malicious SQL statement that tricks the application into executing some database operation intended by the attacker. Usually, this happens when the application developer does not take enough care to filter the user input that's taken in through a form or an API. The repercussions of this attack can be very severe, which may involve access to the records stored in the database or wiping the database clean.
• Cross-Site Scripting Attack (XSS): XSS attacks are another variety of attack that plagues web applications. In this case, the attack usually tricks a user into opening a web page that contains some malicious script. This usually happens when an attacker is able to insert malicious content into a dynamic page through the use of an HTTP input. In this case, when the target user opens the page, the malicious code is executed.
• Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF): Here, an attacker usually constructs a malicious URL to perform some state-change operation on the web service they are currently authenticated with. These state-change operations may be an email address change, password reset, or transfer of funds from one bank account to another. Usually, this happens when the web application does not require any kind of randomness that can be used to distinguish actual user input from malicious user input.
• Defacement attacks (such as Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)): These days, DoS attacks or DDoS attacks are used to deface a web service. In these attacks, the web servers serving the web application are bombarded with a huge number of requests in a short span of time. This causes the web server to overload with a request backlog and hence the web application stops accepting new requests. How a DoS attack differs from a DDoS attack is in the way these attacks originate. In a DoS attack, a fixed set of machines is usually sending a huge number of requests in a short span of time, whereas in a DDoS attack, a large set of machines distributed over a large geography might be sending a large number of packets to the vulnerable application. Usually, the scale at which a DDoS attack occurs is orders of magnitude larger than a DoS attack.
• Credential theft: A lot of web applications depend upon cookies to authenticate users. In this case, a malicious user with access to the cookies of the victims can trick the web application into providing access to secure areas of the application that would not have been possible if the user was not authenticated. This happens when a web application validates the authentication status of the user, but only on the basis of cookies, and does not have any other kind of checks in place.
• Man-in-the-middle attacks: In this kind of attack, an attacker is usually sitting in-between the victim and the party with which the victim is communicating. The attacker can do some simple malicious stuff, such as as eavesdropping on the conversation, or could be active, such as actively modifying the conversation between the two parties while the victim thinks that they are communicating directly with the third party. This usually happens when there is no, or very weak, encryption between the victim and the third party.

With this, we have learned about some of the issues that plague the security of web applications. Most of these issues can be avoided by the developers of web applications by simply performing some additional checks or by validating what data their application gets through the use of web forms or HTTP requests.

Now, we know about the different ways in which the security of either a web application or a native application is compromised. Let's spend some time understanding the mistakes that can happen during the development of an application, which may result in security breaches later.