Seven Deadliest Web Application Attacks

Brute Force

Simple attacks work. Brute force attacks are the Neanderthal equivalent to advanced techniques for encoding and obfuscating XSS payloads or drafting complex SQL queries to extract information from a site's database. The simplicity of brute force attacks doesn't reduce their threat. In fact, the ease of executing a brute force attack should increase its threat value because an attacker need spend no more effort than finding a sufficiently large dictionary of words for guesses and a few lines of code to loop through the complete list. Web sites are designed to serve hundreds and thousands of requests per second, which is an invitation for attackers to launch a script and wait for results. After all, it's a good bet that more than ...