Web Application Attack Analysis

1. Prerequisites

• Web Application Attack Triage completed
• Relevant application, edge, auth, infrastructure, and database logs collected
• Affected app, endpoints, users, and time window identified
• Evidence locations documented

2. Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Build Timeline

   • Correlate edge, application, API gateway, authentication, infrastructure, and database logs.
   • Identify reconnaissance, first exploit attempt, first suspicious success, follow-on activity, and last activity.

2. Classify Attack Path

   • Identify the primary technique: injection, broken access control, session abuse, credential stuffing, file upload abuse, path traversal, API abuse, SSRF, deserialisation, or known CVE exploitation.

3. Confirm Exploitation Status

   • Classify as no evidence, suspected exploitation, confirmed exploitation, or ongoing exploitation.
   • Record supporting evidence.

4. Identify Affected Identities

   • Review user IDs, session IDs, API keys, OAuth tokens, cookies, JWTs, and service accounts tied to suspicious activity.

5. Assess Data Impact

   • Identify records, objects, files, exports, API responses, and database queries accessed during the attack window.
   • Flag customer, payment, credential, regulated, or proprietary data.

6. Review Changes and Persistence

   • Check deployments, configuration changes, admin actions, permission changes, uploaded files, web shells, jobs, and secret access.

7. Correlate Adjacent Activity

   • Review host, container, serverless, cloud control plane, and identity activity where runtime or credential compromise is suspected.

8. Scope Similar Activity

   • Search for the same IPs, user agents, payloads, endpoints, object access patterns, accounts, and tokens across apps and historical logs.

9. Document Findings

   • Record attack type, timeline, affected endpoints, affected users, affected data, indicators, confidence level, and business impact.

10. Record Required Follow-On Actions

    • Flag account compromise, data exposure, exfiltration, known vulnerability exploitation, or active attacker presence.
    • Document containment recommendations and unresolved questions in the incident record.

3. Post-Action

• Attach timeline, findings, affected endpoints, indicators, and evidence references to the incident record.
• Document containment, remediation, monitoring, and detection gaps identified during analysis.

Contributor

Jayden Vo GitHub: https://github.com/jayden-vo

Contributed to the Arcana Incident Response Documentation Framework.