1.  Resources

2.  Monetary Gains

3.  Hacktivism & Boredom

Resources – Utilize your infra for their gains

• Bitcoin mining by injecting bitcoin miners.
• Malvertising or “malicious advertising,” is a relatively new cyberattack technique that injects malicious code within digital ads.
• Watering Hole Attack: This is a targeted attack designed to compromise users within a specific industry by infecting websites they typically visit and luring them to a malicious site.
• Utilize infrastructure to further launch attacks.

Monetary Gains

• Data – To sell critical information like credit card numbers, user credentials, Personally Identifiable Information – PII etc.
• BOT Network  – Renting access to malware-infected infrastructure for monetary gains

Hacktivism & Boredom 

Hacktivism – Hacking and Activism, is the act of hacking or breaking into websites for political or socially motivated purpose.

In today’s digital world, organizations should take proactive measures to protect their digital presence and identity.

Website / Web Application Compromise impact

 Breaches have significant ramifications for any organization and website compromises have a direct impact on brand reputation. Some of the areas of impact are 

• Financial – Revenue Loss
• Brand Reputation
• Resources Impact
• Loss of Confidential Data

Financial – Revenue Loss

A hacked website or web application can result in significant financial and revenue losses as potential customers investigate alternative business options. Systems compromises also lead to day-to-day work disruptions, impacting revenue and causing financial loss. Data breaches have always led to hidden costs arising out of law suits and damage control exercises.

Brand Reputation

The long-term impact of any digital asset compromise on the brand’s reputation is the most difficult to manage.

Resources Impact

The impact of an organisation’s infrastructure being part of an attack on another organisation can be catastrophic for any organization, especially if the website is used for routing spam, backdoors, malware hosting, storing compromised data or is part of a bot network launching large infrastructure attacks.

Loss of Confidential Data

Reputation loss and revenue loss have significant ramifications for any organization, and the impact compounds when confidential data, including the organization’s intellectual property (IP), is compromised. Loss of confidential data also impacts business competitiveness.

How SiteWALL can help?

SiteWALL Web Application Firewall provides extremely fine-grained attack detection and analysis capabilities while protecting against advanced attacks like website cloning, defacement, web-shell attacks and most common Web application threats, including SQL injection attacks, web page tampering, Web site malicious code, and disclosure of sensitive information.

As long as the right security measures are deployed, it is possible to protect the web assets, but any lack of measures in taking these steps to protect the web assets could lead to a world of trouble.

A proactive approach always leads to better security, and time and again, it reminds me of Grossman’s quote. Time and again, the best driver for an organization to re-validate its security is after a compromise or a breach.

Don’t build security measures after you are compromised. A proactive approach with proper visibility and security into traffic will always provide superior security.