Lots of people know use, configure and manage their webservers but only few of them really know
how to protect their web server from getting hacked i.e making it hack proof. Today lots of websites are hosted on a dedicated web servers so it's extremely important to make your web server hack proof in order to
prevent any theft and data loss, Before I mention techniques used by hackers to compromise a web server and how you can protect your web server you should know what a web server is and how it works.
What is a webserver?Basically a webserver is a single computer or more used to host websites, For a website to be available to every one
(connected to internet) 24/7 it needs to be hosted on a webserver
How webservers work?Webservers work in a simple manner, When ever you are using browser to surf any page your browser will request that particular page from the webserver and the server sends back the requested page.
The above picture illustrates how a webserver works.
How Are Webservers Compromised Or hacked? There are multiple reasons why a webserver gets compromised or hacked, one of the major reason is installing the webserver with default and lack of updates and weak passwords. Once the server is compromised the hacker can use it to do malicious things online. For Example Hacked webservers can be used to as zombies to for performing a more powerful
DDOS attackWebserver Hacking TechniquesBelow mentioned are some of the techniques which can be used by malicious hackers to compromise a webserver.
Orthodox Password Cracking Techniques1. A hacker can use variety of password Cracking Techniques such as
Brute force,
Dictionary attacks and rainbow tables to crack weak administrator account passwords, However these attacks create huge logs of presence, so therefore smarter hackers either use a proxy or any other iP hiding method or they use already compromised systems to perform the attack.
2. Man In The Middle AttackA hacker can also perform a man in the middle attack also known as
ARP poisoning to steal credentials of administrator account.
3. Keyloggers And TrojansIf A hacker can manage to install a trojan or a keylogger on administrator's computer then, the malicious hacker can easily capture the credentials
4. DNS Cache Poisoning AttackIf a hacker can manage to insert fake address records for a domain name into DNS server and can make the webserver accept the fake address record then the hacker or intruder can easily control your browser, This attack is extremely dangerous as it happens without the users knowledge, The topic is quite big and is not possible to explain it here, depending upon readers response I might make a seprate tutorial on this attack
There are many other techniques used by hackers such as Ftp server intrusion,
social engineering, exploiting web application bugs which are probably to be explained in the upcoming posts at rha.
Hope you have enjoyed reading the post and have probably got some idea how hackers can attack your web server, In the next post I will continue the series and will introduce some methods you can use to protect your webserver from getting compromised.
