In the world of software development, managing dependencies is a core part of creating strong and secure applications. Spring Boot, a favorite among Java developers, makes building applications easier, but there's more to it than meets the eye. Keeping your dependencies in check is crucial to ensure that your Spring Boot projects run smoothly and remain resilient in the face of ever-evolving threats.
During a recent customer engagement, we encountered an interesting situation. The customer had raised concerns about a Java XXE (XML External Entity) vulnerability that had left their developers puzzled. Notably, their Static Application Security Testing (SAST) scans consistently identified this as a potential vulnerability.
In our connected world, securing digital data has become an utmost priority. With the wide spread of Java applications in various sectors, from banking to healthcare, we must emphasize the importance of encryption. Encryption is converting readable data or plaintext into unreadable data or ciphertext, ensuring that even if encrypted data is intercepted, it remains inaccessible to unauthorized individuals.
If you're a developer working with Java, you likely know Spring Boot, the robust framework that streamlines the development of stand-alone, production-grade, Spring-based applications. One of the many features it offers is Bean Validation, which is a crucial aspect of any application to ensure data integrity and improve user experience.
Containers bring new flexibility and agility to software development and deployment. However, they also introduce a new attack surface that malicious actors can exploit. A compromised container can give an attacker access to other containers and even the host system. Smaller images that contain fewer artifacts are already a great help in achieving a smaller attack surface.
URL encoding is a method that ensures your URL only contains valid characters so that the receiving server can correctly interpret it. According to the RFC 3986 standard, URIs (which are a superset of URLs) only contain a limited set of characters consisting of digits, letters, and a few graphic symbols, all within the ASCII character set. If a URL contains characters outside this limited set, the characters must be percent-encoded.
As traditional phishing attack attachment types like Office documents dwindle in use, threat actors look for new effective ways to use email as a delivery medium to launch an attack. We’ve seen email attachments being used in cyberattacks for decades now, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone working in an office that a strange attachment type may be malicious. And yet, this trend continues, despite threat actors changing which types of attachments to use.