Web Application Attack Triage

1. Prerequisites

• Web, API, WAF, CDN, IDS/IPS, or SIEM alert
• Access to application, edge, auth, and SIEM logs
• Affected application, endpoint, or API identified
• Incident ticket created

2. Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Capture Alert Details

   • Record alert source, timestamp, affected app, endpoint, source IP, user agent, request path, payload indicators, and current severity.

2. Validate Application Context

   • Identify business criticality, production status, internet exposure, and data sensitivity.

3. Classify Attack Type

   • Identify whether activity indicates injection, access control abuse, file upload abuse, path traversal, API abuse, credential stuffing, session abuse, denial of service, or known vulnerability exploitation.

4. Assess Exploitation Status

   • Classify as scanning, attempted exploitation, suspected exploitation, confirmed exploitation, or ongoing attacker activity.

5. Assess Immediate Impact

   • Check for unauthorised access, data access, privilege escalation, web shell, command execution, service disruption, or tampering.

6. Check Active Risk

   • Determine whether malicious requests, attacker sessions, tokens, API keys, or uploaded artifacts remain active.

7. Assign Initial Severity

   • Use application criticality, exploitation status, data sensitivity, active attacker presence, and service impact.

8. Identify Required Evidence

   • List required web, API, WAF/CDN, authentication, and infrastructure logs for follow-on collection.
   • Record sources, retention limits, and urgency.

9. Record Triage Result

   • Document verdict, severity, suspected attack type, affected assets, indicators, evidence needs, and open questions.

3. Post-Action

• Ensure triage findings, evidence needs, affected assets, severity rationale, indicators, and open questions are documented.

Contributor

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

Contributed to the Arcana Incident Response Documentation Framework.