3 Easy Ways to Identify Whether You Could be a Cyberattack Target

Most businesses have a mindset of one of two things:

• We will be a target for cyber criminals and we must do everything we can to protect our business
• We won’t be a target for cyber criminals and there is no reason for them to target us

Here at DigitalXRAID, we know its not if its when. Any business is a target for a cyber criminal. All a hacker wants to do is to make money, from a small business to a large business they will target all. There are certain tell tale signs that you can all look out for to get an idea of whether you are a target or not.

Forms

If you are noticing lots of form completions often with gibberish (SQL Code) it is a clear indication that someone is trying to get into your network. Forms are often the first place a hacker will start if they want to attack your web application.

Look out for something like:

SELECT UserId, Name, Password FROM Users WHERE UserId = 105 or 1=1;

Also, cross site scripting is another target for all attackers, if your forms are vulnerable to cross site scripting this will allow an attacker to execute code on the website and potentially give access to your website data to someone that shouldn’t have it.

You should look out for something like:

<script>alert(“ALERT USER”);</script>

Analytics

Most businesses use analytics of some sort, the most common being Google Analytics. Within your analytics if you notice a spike in traffic from “Direct” traffic it is worth investigating. Lots of cyber tools use crawling: crawling scrapes your web application for a varied number of things including content and vulnerabilities. If you do notice suspicious behaviour you can block the IP the crawl is coming from to ensure you don’t fall victim to an attack.

SSL

Having a valid SSL certificate may seem like an obvious one but you wouldn’t believe how many websites our testers come across that don’t have a valid SSL certificate. This is a gift for an attacker as it lets them instantly know that the web application, most likely, has a vulnerability.