Top Web App Vulnerabilities in 2008 Report

The Web Application Security Consortium (WASC) has announced the WASC Web Application Security Statistics Project 2008.

The statistics includes data from about 12186 web applications with 97554 detected vulnerabilities of different risk levels. The analysis shows that more than 13% of all reviewed sites can be compromised completely automatically. About 49% of web applications contain vulnerabilities of high risk level (Urgent and Critical) detected during automatic scanning. However, detailed manual and automated assessment by white box method allows to detect these high risk level vulnerabilities with probability up to 80-96%. The probability to detect vulnerabilities with risk level more than medium (PCI DSS compliance level) is more than 86% by any method. At the same time, detailed analysis shows that 99% of web applications are not compliant with PCI DSS standard.

SQL Injection, Insufficient Authentication, Insufficient Authorization vulnerabilities detected by automatic scanning.

The following conclusions can be drawn based on the analysis of the Report:

1. The most wide spread vulnerabilities are Cross-site Scripting, different types of Information Leakage, SQL Injection, HTTP Response Splitting;
2. The probability to detect a urgent or critical error in dynamic web application is about 49% by automatic scanning and 96% by comprehensive expert analysis (white box method);
3. Administration issues are 20% more frequent cause of a vulnerability than system development errors;
4. 99% of web application are not compliant with PCI DSS standard requirements, and 48% of web applications are not compliant with criteria of ASV scanning by PCI DSS;
5. Detailed white box method analysis allows to detect up to 91 vulnerabilities per web application, while automatic scanning – only 3;
6. Compared to 2007, the number of sites with wide spread SQL Injection and Cross-site Scripting vulnerabilities fell by 13% and 20%, respectively, however, the number of sites with different types of Information Leakage rose by 24%. On the other hand, the probability to compromise a host automatically rose from 7 to 13 %.

The most widespread vulnerabilities in web applications.



Get the Full Report From WASC website