Half of network management systems vulnerable to injection attacks
Cross-site scripting and SQL injection attacks are well-known threats for public-facing Web applications, but internal systems can be attacked as well. For example, about half of network management systems studied had these vulnerabilities, according to a report released today.
t all comes down to input validation, or lack of it, said Deral Heiland, research lead at Boston-based Rapid7, Inc. and one of the authors of the report.
Network management systems are in regular communication with the devices on a company's network. But, because the communications are machine-to-machine people sometimes forget that the inputs still need to be checked to make sure there's nothing weird or malicious in there. "We're very experienced with ecommerce sites and people putting in bad data," said Heiland. "With a machine-to-machine protocol, would there be less protection, less filtering, with the applications assuming that all the data was trusted?"