Is my site hacked? - security

I have my client website www.healthiva.com.. this is developed in .Net C#. In global.asax i have a functionality to send alert email to development team, if any unhandled exceptions are thrown in the whole application. Some times dev team gets email like "The file '/ivr/VAD_Deploy1.aspx' does not exist", "The file '/ivr/mxm_3cx/mxm30.aspx' does not exist".. Our application does not have these files obviously & hence the error. Now my worry is, is someone trying to hack our site by running some scripts ? if yes, please suggest some good security policies.. (the site already uses SSL)..

You are safe
I've just done a couple of tests to see, and it appears that you are getting these errors because other resources in your application are trying to access these directories. Rather than handle these errors and provide a user safe code, it's simply throwing a default server error. Your website is not being hacked - it's just badly written (Sorry, no offence) and lacks sufficient logging techniques.
However, that does not mean that you are still 100% safe. You can either consult with a private security expert or look at automated tools online to test the security of your website. I'd recommend doing some research on the OWASP Top 10 for this, and how to prevent these measures. Most hackers will try to go for one of these methods before trying more robust and niché attacks.
EDIT: Relevant image showing what happens when the server throws an exception

Related

Microfrontend or how to share smart UI components?

I work in a company where we have many different applications. To reduce code repetition and keep the experience for the users the same across applications we created a component library which is used by all applications.
Now we want to allow the users to switch between applications. Something similar like Google does:
Screenshot of Google Application Drawer
An additional requirement for our "Application Switcher" would be that it "updates" itself. Meaning if we change how this "Application Switcher" looks we don't want all applications which use this Switcher to create a new deployment and be newly deployed.
So currently we use the same header (from our component library) in all our applications. So, my idea was just to simply add a script tag to all the index.html pages of all the applications which should support this "Application Switcher". The Script would parse the DOM, find the header and inject a component for this application switcher. I wanted to host the actual script from a CDN like server and the script tag in the index.html just references this URL. This way we could change this script however we want, and all the applications will always get the latest version.
Now I did a small proof of concept in our environments and solved all the CORS issues but since we were fetching from an authenticated context and the script was also in an authenticated context I always got a 401.
Additionally, we have the requirement, that this "Application Switcher" shows different applications to different users i.e. depending on which apps a user is allowed to access. So, the script itself will also do calls to an "Application Switcher" backend providing it user-specific information.
Now this makes me think that my initial idea of just putting a script tag and fetching from a CDN was too simplistic. Now I'm thinking if it would be better to implement a rest endpoint in all applications to fetch this script. This way I don't have the problems of fetching a resource from an authenticated context from the user's browser and instead can handle all of this in the backend.
So long story short; I feel like a complete noob who just hacks around to get things working (or actually not working) and was wondering if any of the smart internet people out there (who might actually already have experience with this) could give me a hint what would be a clean way to implement this?

Securing application in Silverlight

I have this application in silverlight 5. Actually the problem is with its security. I'd used HTTPS but still the query I fire within the application can be decrypted by FIDDLER and can be used to get all the data from the database. Please suggest something to prevent this. Or at least any link to get start with. I'd already implemented some suggestions from MSDN but still the application has the same issue.

Security considerations when creating a mobile app using PhoneGap

I'm a beginner in creating mobile apps with phonegap. I have some doubts on security aspects, when creating a mobile app with phonegap.
I want to create an app that accesses a Web service, e.g. a REST service created using Jersey. Now, am I correct in thinking that a hacker can easily see the security keys/authentication mechanism used, to authenticate the client (on a mobile app) with the server (where REST API is to be used)?
In general, can a hacker easily access all data being sent by the mobile app (which was created using phonegap)?
Can a hacker disassemble a phonegap app to obtain original code? Wont he get the native code (e.g. Objective C in case of ios)? Or can he decompile even that into original phonegap code (ie html+js)? How do I prevent my code from being decompiled? Is this scenario the same as for most other languages i.e. hackers with powerful PCs can hack into just about any program/software? Is there some way to prevent this from happening?
Allright, first take a deep breath. You are probably not going to like some of my answers but you'll be living with the same issues that we all are.
The best thing to do in this case is to use something like the KeyChain plugin to retrieve your security keys from the native side.
You can take PhoneGap out of the question because it applies to any situation where you send unencrypted data between a client and server. Anyone can easily listen in using a number of tools including Wireshark or Ethereal. If you need to communicate with a sever it should be done on an encrypted, HTTPS or SSL, connection.
First I think you are under the mistaken impression that PhoneGap compiles your HTML/JS code into Obj-C. It does not. If the user uncompresses your app they will be able to read your HTML/JS. Also, they'll be able to decompile your Obj-C code as well. This does not take a powerful PC or even an experienced hacker. Pretty much anyone can do it.
My advice to you is not to worry about it. Put your time into creating a truly great app. The people who will pay for it will pay for it. The folks who decompile it would never buy the app no matter what. The more time you take trying to combat the hackers takes away from the time you could use to make your app greater. Also, most anti-hacking measures just make life harder for your actual users so in fact they are counter productive.
TLDR -
Consider that you are coding a website and all code ( html and js ) will be visible to user with
Crtl+Shift+i as in browsers
Some points for ensuring maximum security
If your using backend then recheck everything coming from the app
All attacks possible on websites (XSS, redicting to malacious webistes , cloning webistes, etc are possible )
All the data sent to the app will finally be available in some js variables / resource files , Since all variables are accessible by hacker so is all the data sent to app EVEN IF YOU ARE USING THE MOST SECURE DATA TRANSMISSION MECHANISMS
As Simon correctly said in his ans , phonegap or cordova does not convert html / js to native code . Html / Js is available as-it-is
Cordova also explicitly mentions this in their official statement
Do not assume that your source code is secure
Since a Cordova application is built from HTML and JavaScript assets that get packaged in a native container, you should not consider your code to be secure. It is possible to reverse engineer a Cordova application.
5.Mainly all the techniques which are used by websites to prevent their code from being cloned / easily understood are applicable even here (Mainly it includes converting js code into hard to read format - obfuscating code)
6.Comparing native apps with cordova/phonegap apps native apps , I would say that cordova are easier for hacker only because of lack of awareness between cordova developers who do not take enough measures to secure it and lack of readily available(one click ) mechanisms to directly obfuscate the code vs in android proguard
Sample Cordova App Hacking (NOTE:Phonegap also works in similar way)
I'll show an example to show how easy is it for hacker to hack a cordova app(where developer has taken no efforts in obfuscating the code )
basically we start with unzipping the apk files (apks can be unzipped like zip files )
The contents inside will be similar to this
The source code for cordova apps is present in /assets/www/ folder
As you can see all the contents including any databases that you have packed with the app are visible(see last 2 rows have a db file )
Along with it any other resources are also directly visible (text files/js / html/ audio / video / etc)
All the views / controllers are visible and editable too
Further exploring the contents we find a PaymentController.js file
Opening it we can directly see the js code and other comments
here we note that after user performs payment if it is successful then successCallback is called else cancelCallback is called.
Hacker can simply replace the two functions so that when payment is not successful successCallback is called .
In absence of other checks the hacker has successfully bypassed payment.

Best way to use a dll from an ASP script

I'm writing some ASP code to service requests from a simple HTML form on my company's intranet. The code needs to call methods from a (COM) dll. I'm using the code:
myObject = Server.CreateObject("myDLL.myClass")
but it's giving an error at this line. I'm not sure if the dll is registered on the server, but I suspect it may not be. I'm not sure how to find this out.
If it's not registered, is it possible/best practice to:
Use the dll without registering it on the server (I have the .dll file);
Remotely register the dll safely using ASP code; or
Do I need to contact the IT dept to get it registered?
I'm worried that option 2 might freak the IT department out and also possibly break something - but I have a deadline and it's unlikely that they will get around to registering anything before then.
Is there any way I can use the dll without involving them, purely with ASP?
I've also got this question open regarding running the dll on the client's computers by embedding in the intranet form, which is my preferred method if it's possible. It's the same dll, and it's already registered on all clients' machines but so far I've been unable to get it passed the IE intranet security settings.
ANY help/comments/suggestions on this or my other thread would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for reading.
you need to register the DLL AFAIK, either with a setup program that does it, or manually with regsvr32 (or similar)

Publishing to IIS - Best Practices

I'm not new to web publishing, BUT I am new to publishing against a web site that is frequently used. Previously, the apps on this server were not hit very often, but we're rolling out a high demand application. So, what is the best practice for publishing to a live web server?
Is it best to wait until the middle
of the night when people won't be on
it (Yes, I can pretty much rely on
that -- it's an intranet and
therefore will have times of
non-use)
Publish when new updates are made to
the trunk (dependent on build
success of course)
If 2 is true, then that seems bad if someone is using that specific page or DLL and it gets overwritten.
...I'm sure there are lots of great places for this kind of thing, but I didn't use the right google search terms.
#Nick DeVore wrote:
If 2 is true, then that seems bad if
someone is using that specific page or
DLL and it gets overwritten.
It's not really an issue if you're using ASP.NET stack (Webforms, MVC or rolling your own) because all your aspx files get compiled and therefore not touched by webserver. /bin/ folder is completely shadowed somewhere else, so libraries inside are not used by webserver either.
IIS will wait until all requests are done (however there is some timeout though) and then will proceed with compilation (if needed) and restart of AppDomain. If only a few files have changed, there won't even be AppDomain restart. IIS will load new assemblies (or compiled aspx/asmx/ascx files) into existing AppDomain.
#Nick DeVore wrote:
Help me understand this a little bit
more. Point me to the place where this
is explained from Microsoft. Thanks!
Try google for "IIS AppDomain" keywords. I found What ASP.NET Programmers Should Know About Application Domains.
We do most of our updates in the wee small hours.
Handy hint, if this is an ASP.NET site, whatever time of the day you roll out, drop in an App_Offline.htm file with a message explaining to users that the site is down for maintenance.
Scott Guthrie has more info here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/04/09/442332.aspx

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