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Tests show rise in number of vulnerabilities affecting web applications with SQL Injection and XSS most common flaws

1st March 2011 SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) were the most common flaws found in web applications in 2010 according to results from tests carried out by NTA Monitor. Read More

Assess risk to manage effects of budget cuts

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"Basic security threats not changed in 15 years"

1st February 2011 There may have been significant technological advances to the hardware and software organisations use, but according to Roy Hills, who co-founded NTA Monitor in 1996, the basic security threats have not changed in the last 15 years. Read More
Date: 30th December 2005
Risk: High

Some vulnerabilities have been reported in phpBB by the security firm Secunia, which can be exploited to conduct cross-site scripting and SQL injection attacks, bypass certain security restrictions and compromise a vulnerable system.

Details of the vulnerabilities:

  1. Some errors where global variables defined by the user are not properly unset can be exploited in combination with certain input validation errors to execute arbitrary HTML and script code in a user's browser session in context of an affected site. This can also be exploited to manipulate SQL queries by injecting arbitrary SQL code and inject and execute arbitrary PHP code.
    • Successful exploitation requires that "register_globals" is enabled and that the server runs PHP 5.
    • The vulnerabilities have been reported in version 2.0.17 and prior.
  2. An error in the removing of orphaned entries can be exploited by non moderators to delete shadow topic links.
    • Successful exploitation requires knowledge of the topic ID for a "shadow topic" entry.
  3. An error in the handling of logout requests can be exploited to logout users who views a malicious post containing an "img" BBcode tag referencing a specially crafted URL.

References