In today’s scenario of the digital world, every traveling company upgrades to their approach of business and concentrates on marketing. And companies investing money in marketing to develop, but companies don’t care about security. By the carelessness of securing customers’ data. Most of the traveling companies are vulnerable. . we have seen many travel companies are providing online services to book tickets & hotels. Moving from one place to another became very easy in recent times. And the technological advancements made it more convenient for people as they can travel anywhere by sitting in front of their systems, as they book their tickets online, make their payments, to get their tickets online. This process allows the user to save their time and also they can select their preferred seat. Saving our time and make easy to book tickets, yeah it’s a great thing !.. But hackers took a chance to exploit their application book tickets for a cheap price. Wow, it’s a huge loss to the companies. Let me think. what is the reason and why is this happening?
Every newly started company or very well established company, to know the digital world makes our work easy but not secure. I heard about a company it’s started as a startup and running. Know that it has become more popular and makes standard in their economy and it is also in very good profits. Everything is going well but one fine day the problem started gradually decreasing of their customers and profits. And everything is done and it’s over. when the company knows what happens. You know what happens actually is a flaw in their application, and the next question raised how this flaw occurs in the application. And finally know we made a mistake to give an application project to an unprofessional developer depending on pre-designed codes to build the application, and not maintain proper security policies, payment policies.
Hackers took a chance to exploit their application and steal their data and user’s credentials and sensitive information like credit card numbers, CVV numbers. To erect a company reputation it takes several years. To demolish their reputation it just takes days. Avoid these types of security threats to maintain proper security management or else appoint independent cybersecurity companies, or IT professionals.
Are these travel company Applications are secured?
In SwiftSafe R&D team started researching travel industry company websites/applications to know how they are maintaining proper security standards, We have found many travel companies are vulnerable with maintaining poor security controls.
Some companies are not even considering their application and data security. They have good and plenty of resources for keeping their Applications secured but they are not using them efficiently, many companies are vulnerable to business logic vulnerabilities that cannot be found with automation, scanning. Attackers can manipulate the pricing values, using a single coupon several times, payment gateway misconfiguration, security controls miss-configuration controls, which may lead to traveling at low prices or completely free of cost.
Business logic vulnerabilities are defined as security weaknesses or bugs in the functional or design aspect of the application. it is often missed by all existing automated and web application scanners.
Despite vulnerability assessments, code scans, and security controls, you still can be victimized by Business Logic Abuse. This type of attack is unique because the Bad Guys are not necessarily exploiting a security hole–they are often using the site as it is functionally designed–to defraud you. With online criminals bringing innovation and quick response to their activities, you have to counter them equally by fresh thinking.
One of the business logic vulnerabilities. Tampering the communication between the payment gateway and booking application. The application does not verify whether the required amount is successfully paid at the Payment Gateway Side, or what amount is being paid at the Payment Gateway Side. As a result, a virtual card can be recharged with a higher amount while paying a lower amount to the bank by modifying the amount when the request is sent from the payment gateway to the bank.
There should be sufficient validations, security controls between the application and the payment gateway. The callback URL should not be allowed to be directly controlled by an attacker due to misconfiguration of security controls on their servers that may lead to data breaches.
Attackers can able to travel completely free of cost with business logic vulnerability. The number of companies also vulnerable as per OWASP TOP 10, SANS TOP 25, standards where we can manipulate the data in the database, defacing the website, crashing the entire website, and also any number of websites are prone to payment gateway issues where we can change the prices, leakage of sensitive data like the credit/debit card numbers, login id’s, passwords, etc. Which are not encrypted properly, these vulnerabilities are creating huge losses to the companies. To Secure your company applications by performing penetration testing & vulnerability assessment. And also PCI DSS Compliance is essential for organizations dealing with card payments. It sets strong security measures against external threats and prevents data breaches. But using the DLP(Data loss prevention) tool can help organizations discover, monitor, and control their data stored within the organization and prevent the risk of internal threats. The tool helps administrators monitor how the data is being used and transferred, bringing them one step closer to achieving compliance. Data Loss Prevention is therefore an essential tool for PCI DSS compliance. The tool ensures that cardholder information is identified, prioritized logged, and controlled, thus helping organizations meet PCI DSS requirements and protect data against internal threats.
Travel Free of Cost with vulnerable travel companies More than 80% of travel companies are vulnerable to travel free of cost in India as per SwiftSafe R&D research. Most of the companies are having plenty of resources to secure their companies. But, Companies are not even considering IT Security.
Due to their negligence, Attackers can able travel free of cost. Secure your companies from Cyberattacks.
Thus the reason why it is important to get an independent set of eyes on the applications and servers. To be reviewed by security people who have a clear and perfect knowledge about these vulnerabilities, by people who won’t make any assumptions about why the code does what it does, or be biased by anything or anyone within your organization.
What we are suggesting is to get a regular security audit, and implement security controls to improve your company IT infrastructure that can give you a baseline from which to grow.
Make sure that your servers are set to update to the latest security releases as they become available. I’m not suggesting updating each and every package, but at least the security-specific ones.
This can be potentially daunting if you’re a young organization, one recently embarking on a security-first approach. But, setting concerns aside, frequent security audits can help you build secure applications quicker than you otherwise might.
Swiftsafe Security professionals educate clients, identifies security risks, informs intelligent business decisions, and enable you to reduce your attack surface digitally, physically, and socially.
Test the effectiveness of your own security controls before malicious parties do it for you.
We pride ourselves on being unique–and we understand that your organization needs us.
Author Bio:
Akhil Rapelli, CTO Swiftsafe
