Every second, organizations face an evolving battlefield in cybersecurity. APIs and cloud environments—the backbone of modern businesses—are prime targets for attackers exploiting overlooked vulnerabilities. A single breach can now cost organizations an average of $4.88 million. For businesses, this means heightened risks across critical systems, compounded by the struggle to identify vulnerabilities quickly enough.

On September 19th, 2024, a critical vulnerability (CVE-2024-40748) was discovered in Joomla version 5.1.4, exposing their website to stored cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Stored cross-site scripting (second-order or persistent XSS) arises when an application receives data from an untrusted source and unsafely includes it within its later HTTP responses. This could lead to attackers injecting malicious scripts into the website, which would be executed whenever a user visits a specific page.

Vulnerability scanning is the process of assessing web applications, mobile apps, APIs, systems, networks, or cloud infrastructures to identify security weaknesses. It uses automated tools to detect known CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), misconfigurations, and potential attack vectors, helping to secure assets against cyber threats.

On October 9, 2024, the security researchers at Astra Security found an HTML injection vulnerability in the messages section of the Admidio User Management solution. The vulnerability, assigned CVE-2024-47836, allows attackers to inject arbitrary HTML content into the application, which could manipulate webpage behavior, mislead users, and act as a precursor to further attacks.

The researchers from Astra’s security team, on November 6, 2024, found a Stored Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) in InstantCMS, a free and open-source CMS that allows you to build websites. The vulnerability was identified in the photo album page’s photo upload function.

On 29 July 2024, the researchers at Astra identified a critical vulnerability in UnifiedTransform, a popular school management software. CVE-2024-53573 is an improper access control vulnerability in an admin endpoint, leading to an account takeover.

A pentest is the process of evaluating the cyber security posture of an organization by finding all possible vulnerabilities in its infrastructure and exploiting them. A pentest uncovers security vulnerabilities across web apps, networks, apps, and humans via social engineering attack simulation.

In the rapidly changing field of software development, application programming interfaces (APIs) are very powerful tools. They allow different applications to communicate, share data, and collaborate seamlessly, constituting approximately 71% of all web traffic. However, as APIs become more essential to our applications, they also attract cyber threats. In fact, 57% of organizations reported experiencing at least one API-related data breach in the past two years.

Every single day, billions of API calls happen across the internet. Behind your favorite applications, APIs work quietly to move data and connect systems. But with the growing use of APIs, API attacks didn’t just increase – they exploded. Take the Optus breach in September 2022, in which attackers exploited an unprotected API endpoint and accessed the personal data of up to 9.8 million customers, leading to a $10 million fine.

Web application penetration testing involves performing a simulated attack on a web app to determine weaknesses that hackers can exploit. The testing process uses emulations of real-world attacks to identify hidden attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), or cross-site request forgery (CSRF). What is the worst that could happen if you don’t continuously test your web application for vulnerabilities?