6 Software Errors that Cybercriminals Love to Exploit

As a software developer and analyst, you want to do your best to keep your software safe from vulnerabilities. Coding and configuration errors are one of the main causes of software vulnerabilities that cybercriminals love to exploit. You can significantly enhance your product’s security by eliminating coding errors that can easily be exploited. In this article, we have put together a list of the most common software errors that cybercriminals love to exploit.

1) Improper certificate validation

Improper certificate validation happens when the software incorrectly validates or fails to validate a certificate. An invalid or malicious certificate makes it easy for an attacker to interfere with the communication path between a client and host. The attacker can easily trick the software into connecting to a malicious host, believing it’s a trusted host.

Software development is a complex process, and it’s usually hard to keep software secure as it ages. To avoid this and other mistakes mentioned below and excel in your career in Cyber Security in Australia, you must keep yourself updated on the latest methodologies, security tools, and knowledge in order to keep your software secure.

2) Untrusted search path

Allowing the application to search for crucial resources using an uncontrolled search path can lead to resources that are not under the direct control of the application. This allows hackers to execute their own programs, modify configurations, or unauthorized access data.

3) Information exposure

This occurs when the application exposes crucial information to an unauthorized actor. There are several mistakes that can lead to information exposure, and the severity of exposure depends on the type of information exposed, the context in which the product operates, and the benefits the exposed information might provide to an attacker. Information exposure can happen in the following ways:

• The code explicitly inserts sensitive data into messages and resources that are intentionally made available to unauthorized persons

• A different mistake or weakness inserts the sensitive data into the resources or messages, for instance, a web script error exposing the program’s system path

• The code purposely manages information resources that contain sensitive data, but the resources are unintentionally made available to unauthorized users.

4) Out-of-bounds writes

This happens when the software writes data before the beginning or past the end of the intended buffer, and can lead to a crash, corruption of data, or code execution.

5) NULL pointer dereference

This happens when the application dereferences a point that is expected to be valid but is NULL, leading to a crash. NULL pointer dereferences problems can result from various flaws, including simple programming omissions and race conditions.

6) Using hard-coded credentials

Using hard-coded credentials such as a cryptographic key or password is a bad practice. They create a significant vulnerability that an attacker can exploit to bypass the authentication that the software administrator has configured. This vulnerability may be hard for the system administrator to detect and fix even if it’s detected, and they may be forced to disable the entire product.

Endnote

Software security is an intrinsic part of software development and implementation. You can enhance your software security by avoiding these software errors.