标签：#websecurity

By Samyuktha Introduction Some categories in the OWASP Top 10 are about what's broken in your own code. A03 and A04 are about something a little different — whether you can trust what your application depends on, and whether sensitive data is actually protected wherever it lives or travels. This post covers what I learned about both categories, and how I applied that thinking to an authorized web application afterward. The result wasn't a dramatic one, and part of it wasn't even fully testable. Both of those turned out to be useful lessons in their own right. Scope : This post covers concepts I studied around A03 and A04, plus a hands-on look at the client-side resources, storage, and login/dashboard flow of an authorized application. No destructive testing was performed, and identifying details about the target have been omitted. I'll refer to it simply as the assessed application. Phase 1: A03 — Software Supply Chain Failures This category covers what happens when an application depends on components that are compromised, vulnerable, outdated, unverified, or poorly managed — libraries, packages, SDKs, APIs, models, even the CI/CD pipeline that builds and ships everything. A few concepts stood out: Third-party risk isn't your code, but it's still your problem — a vulnerability doesn't have to originate in your own codebase to affect your application. It can arrive through a dependency you imported once and never revisited. Build pipeline integrity — an insecure or poorly monitored CI/CD process can be just as dangerous as a vulnerable library, since it controls what actually reaches production. Provenance matters — knowing where a component came from, and whether it's been tampered with, is as important as knowing what it does. Continuous tracking, not one-time review — dependencies need to be monitored and patched on an ongoing basis, not just checked once at integration time. The SolarWinds incident is the go-to example here — attackers compromised a build system

Last night I ran external security scans on the public websites of 10 leading Shopify and Shopify Plus agencies — the same scan any browser or attacker would see. No credentials, no special access. One agency scored an A. Three scored C- or below. The most common finding appeared on 9 of 10 sites. TL;DR 1 agency scored an A. 3 scored C- or below. 1 scored a D. The most common finding — missing security headers — appeared on 9 of 10 sites. 6 of 10 agencies have no HSTS at all. One agency has a session cookie without the Secure flag. That is the most concrete finding in the set. What was scanned Five categories per domain: TLS (HSTS presence and max-age), security headers (CSP, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy), cookie flags, DNS hardening (DNSSEC and CAA) and sensitive exposure paths. All scans run on 23 June 2026. This covers the agencies' own marketing sites — not the client stores they build. Results Agency Domain Score Grade 1Digital Agency 1digitalagency.com 94 A Acidgreen acidgreen.com.au 77 B 30 Acres 30acres.com.au 76 B Fourmeta fourmeta.com 76 B Blend Commerce blendcommerce.com 76 B Elkfox elkfox.com 76 B Charle Agency charleagency.com 62 C Fyresite fyresite.com 62 C Eastside Co eastsideco.com 58 C- Swanky Agency swankyagency.com 55 C- Blubolt blubolt.com 54 D Per-agency notes 1Digital Agency — A (94) HSTS at two years, X-Content-Type-Options and Referrer-Policy set correctly, Permissions-Policy restricting camera, microphone and geolocation, CSP frame-ancestors in place of X-Frame-Options. Only gap is HSTS missing includeSubDomains. Acidgreen — B (77) HSTS with two-year max-age, includeSubDomains and preload — the strongest TLS config in the set. But CSP, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy and Permissions-Policy are all absent. Worth noting Acidgreen is multi-platform (Shopify Plus, Adobe Commerce, Magento) rather than Shopify-only. 30 Acres — B (76) A Shopify Plus Partner agency based in Byr

By Sailee Shingare | M.S in Computer Science, Northern Illinois University Every time you visit a website, your browser and the server have a conversation. That conversation happens over a protocol — either HTTP or HTTPS. You’ve seen both in your browser’s address bar. But what’s actually different between them, and why does it matter? Let’s break it down. What is HTTP? HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol . It’s the foundation of data communication on the web — the set of rules that defines how your browser requests information and how servers respond. When you visit a website over HTTP, here’s what happens: You type a URL in your browser Your browser sends a request to the server The server sends back the webpage Your browser displays it Simple. But there’s a problem — everything is sent in plain text . Anyone sitting between you and the server can read it. Your passwords, your credit card numbers, your messages — all visible. This is where HTTPS comes in. What is HTTPS? HTTPS stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure . It’s HTTP with an extra layer of security called TLS (Transport Layer Security) — previously known as SSL. The S in HTTPS means everything between your browser and the server is encrypted . Even if someone intercepts the data, they see nothing but scrambled gibberish. What Actually Happens When You Visit an HTTPS Website When you visit an HTTPS site, your browser and the server perform a TLS Handshake before any data is exchanged. Here’s what happens step by step: Step 1 — Client Hello Your browser says hello to the server and shares which encryption methods it supports. Step 2 — Server Hello The server picks an encryption method and sends back its SSL certificate — a digital document that proves the server is who it claims to be. Step 3 — Certificate Verification Your browser checks the certificate against a list of trusted authorities. If it’s valid, the connection proceeds. If not, you see a warning — “Your connection is not private.”