Pete Freitag Pete Freitag

Web Application Vulnerabilities trump Buffer Overflows

Updated on November 17, 2023
By Pete Freitag
web

This should be an eye opener to many. In September Mitre reported that web application vulnerabilities are claiming the top three spots on their CVE request list, beating out Buffer Overflows.

  1. Cross Site Scripting (21.5%)
  2. SQL Injection (14%)
  3. PHP includes (9.5%)
  4. Buffer overflows (7.9%)

Mike Sutton wanted to know just how prevalent are SQL Injection Vulnerabilities? So he ran a little test, and found that out of 1000 web sites 11.3% of them were vulnerable!

I also heard this from Mike Andrews in his How to Break Web Software talk. He says that the number of buffer overflow vulnerabilities have been going down over the years as more people are aware of them, and there are lots of automated tools for finding them. But the number of web application vulnerabilities has been sky rocketing.

Buffer Overflows were first talked about in the 1970's by the NSA, and they are still somewhat of a problem - do you think we will still be talking about Cross Site Scripting and SQL Injection in 30 years?



security xss vulnerabilities buffer overflows sql injection

Web Application Vulnerabilities trump Buffer Overflows was first published on November 02, 2006.

If you like reading about security, xss, vulnerabilities, buffer overflows, or sql injection then you might also like:

Weekly Security Advisories Email

Advisory Week is a new weekly email containing security advisories published by major software vendors (Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, etc).