What is Fuzz Testing?

What is fuzz testing? What are different fuzzing attacks, and how to prevent them? Read this article to find answers to these questions and secure your website.

WordPress has many security vulnerabilities that a hacker exploits to his advantage. Finding out vulnerabilities will not be a difficult task for him if he can use fuzz testing.

WordPress is a well-known CMS used by people all over the world. There are more than 455 million websites that use WordPress. You’ve got to admit, that’s a huge number! Popularity attracts attention, so has WordPress. The alarmingly huge demand that WordPress has now has made hackers shift their focus to WordPress websites. It’s easier to target something that is more exposed to the world, no? Hence, WordPress users have been working a bit harder on securing their websites. But the tricks hackers use can be endless.

We must be looking out for threats all the time and take appropriate measures to counter-attack every move of theirs. This article walks you through one such website attack; the ways a hacker uses fuzz testing, about fuzzing attacks, and their prevention methods.

What is fuzz testing anf how to prevent a fuzzing attack

What Is Fuzz Testing?

Fuzz testing is a software testing method used to discover various code errors, vulnerabilities, and loopholes by adding an invalid code to that software. The data or code inserted during fuzz testing is known as “fuzz.” We often use this technique for finding any website crashes, built-in code failure, and memory leakage.

Here is a flowchart that will help you understand the way fuzz attack takes place for WordPress vulnerability assessment:

What is fuzz testing- flow chart
Flowchart representing the execution of fuzz testing

Fuzz testing not only identifies the problem but also shows the root cause of the problem. It is an automatic process that doesn’t need much of your time. Hence, it has become widely used because of its effectiveness and user-friendliness. 

How Does A Fuzzing Attack Work?

Fuzz testing can be very efficient as long as the bad do not people use it. You can enhance your website security with this helpful technique, but attackers can use this as a perfect opportunity to abuse your website. Let us see various ways in which a hacker can use the vulnerabilities and put fuzzing attacks to work:

Malware Injection

The best way to attack a website is to target its base, that is, its code. Finding vulnerabilities in a source code of a website is relatively using fuzzing attack.

Once the hacker finds the vulnerabilities, he can initialize code injection. A hacker can use distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to crash the website and prevent users from gaining access to their accounts.

Request Manipulation

When a hacker finds any vulnerabilities during request processing using the fuzzing attack, he can misuse this vulnerability to manipulate the requests. He can use an SQL injection to insert malicious code into the entry fields and access your website.

Weak Authorization

Using weak login credentials and weak authorization regarding the website or while protecting confidential areas can be an extreme disadvantage. If a hacker finds this vulnerability by fuzzing reconnaissance, he can use cross-site scripting(XSS) attacks and manipulate the code to approve authorization to outsiders( precisely the hackers).

There are different types of fuzzing attacks, they are:

Dumb Fuzzing Attack

Hackers use this attack when they do not wish to spend much time analyzing the website for a specific target to hit. They send some random fuzz and look for any website faults. You can see why this is called a dumb attack.

 Smart Fuzzing Attack

Hackers analyze the website using appropriate programming to understand the website’s working and develop this fuzzing attack. This attack is time-consuming, but it’s worth the time spent because it reveals deep vulnerabilities.

Mutation-Based, Generation-Based, And Evolutionary Fuzzing Attacks

There are mutation-based fuzzing attacks and generation-based fuzzing attacks too. While mutation-based attacks manipulate the known and existing inputs, generation-based attacks create the inputs from scratch.

There is an evolutionary fuzzing attack where the hacker keeps track of the results of random data input and develops the best input using that information to exploit the website.

How To Prevent Fuzzing attacks?

A fuzzing attack doesn’t have a specific target; that’s what makes this attack immensely dangerous. We must avoid all kinds of security mistakes. It is easy to block a single strike when you realize what it is. However, it is not so simple when a single attack can lead to different opportunities.

Fret not because every problem has a solution. When dealing with an attack like this, it is best to use a security plugin that can tackle many issues at once. One such WordPress security plugin is Hide My WP.

We can also use the WordPress security scanner plugin like the Scan My WP plugin to stay one step ahead of hackers. Scan My WP helps you find out vulnerabilities of your website, and all you have to do is rectify those issues.

Some of the remarkable features of “Hide My WP” are:

hide my wp security plugin
  • It allows you to hide the names of themes and plugins folders.
  • It will hide your WordPress.
  • It helps you change WordPress permalinks.
  • It helps you to hide the login page of your website to prevent brute-force attacks. This feature will help you set up a login query and login key.
  • It has a firewall that can block dangerous attacks like SQL, XSS, CSRF, read arbitrary files, and brute force attacks.
  • It will assist in hiding or renaming WP-admins.
  • It hides your WordPress from theme detectors, hackers, and bots.
  • It has a robust trust network that blocks unknown attacks.
  • It will disable direct access to PHP files and directory listing.
  • It will help you block potentially dangerous IP addresses.
  • It will let you minify HTML and CSS.
  • It will allow you to change anything in your source code.
  • It informs the user about:
  1. Value (How they hack you?)
  2. Page (Which plugin did they use?)
  3. Impact (How dangerous is that?)
  4. IP/ users (Where are they from?)
  • It has anti-spam included.

Summing It Up

  • Fuzz testing is a software testing technique that lets you discover vulnerabilities in a website by inserting code known as fuzz.
  • A hacker can use a fuzzing attack for diverse reasons like malware injection, manipulation of requests, and misuse of weak authorization.
  • We have many types of fuzzing attacks like dumb fuzzing, smart fuzzing, mutation-based fuzzing, generation-based fuzzing, and evolutionary fuzzing attacks.
  • Obscuring these attacks can be possible by using advanced security plugins like the “Hide My WP.”

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