Most common attacks on web applications

Submitted by Paweł Krawczyk on Wed, 2013-03-06 19:26

web application security

This page contains most currently known quantitative data sets on web application attack methods, collected as result (and as an addendum) to a discussion on new OWASP Top 10 in early 2013. Note that these data sets are sometimes of very different nature and often cannot be directly compared. Nonetheless, I strongly believe in most cases they give a pretty good picture on how are applications attacked in real life.

Web Hacking Incident Database (WHID)

Based on ~1300 hacking or data breach reports published in the news since 2000, updated manually. Some reports cover multiple compromised servers (up to 90'000 at once), but each such campaign is counted as one incident here.

Attack method	Percentage
Denial of Service	25%
SQL Injection	24%
Cross Site Scripting (XSS)	8.9%
Brute Force	4.8%
Predictable Resource Location	3.8%
Stolen Credentials	3.7%
Unintentional Information Disclosure	3%
Banking Trojan	2.8%
Credential/Session Prediction	2.1%
Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF)	1.9%

Full data (CSV): WHID attack methods count, WHID attack methods percents. Tables at Google: Web-Hacking-Incident-Database. Project page: WebAppSec.org

TrustWave

TrustWave 2013 Global Security Report. Based on 450 data breach investigations, below data taken from table "Method of entry", page 13.

Attack method	Percentage
Remote access	47%
SQL injection	26%
Unknown	18%
Client-side attack	2%
Remote file inclusion	2%
Remote code execution	3%
Authorization flaw	1%
Physical theft	1%

Full data (CSV): TrustWave attack methods count, TrustWave attack methods percents

Attack method	Percentage
E107 CMS arbitrary code execution	0.92%
OSCommerce arbitrary file inclusion	1.4%
SQL injection (SQLi)	1.77%
Remote File Inclusion (RFI)	2.58%
PHP-CGI attack	7.99%
Local File Inclusion (LFI)	25.93%
Timthumb WordPress plugin PHP code injection	59.41%

Source: The Life Cycle of Web Server Botnet Recruitment, 2013

Imperva

Data on attempted attacks on websites detected by Imperva.

Attack method	Percentage
Cross-Site Scripting	37.1%
Remote access	47%
Directory Traversal	21.8%
SQL injection	14%
Local File Inclusion	10.3%
Remote File Inclusion	6%
Comment Spam	5.8%
Email Extraction	5.1%

Source: Web Application Attack Report Edition #2.

Zone-H

Based on defacement reports published by Zone-H. Covers over 90'000 incidents over three months from Dec 2012 till Feb 2013. The ranking is based on unpublished data which I received courtesy of Zone-H.

Attack method	Percentage
File Inclusion	53.5%
SQL Injection	10.1%
known vulnerability (i.e. unpatched system)	6.8%
Other Web Application bug	4.9%
undisclosed (new) vulnerability	3.9%
Other Server intrusion	3.7%
configuration / admin. mistake	2.3%
URL Poisoning	2.2%
Web Server intrusion	2.1%