Cross-Site Request Forgery Attacks and Mitigations

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks: there are already enough articles out there that can explain what a CSRF attack is and provide potential examples. There are also plenty of security alerts that have been released by various vendors whose products are affected by CSRF-related vulnerabilities.

CSRF attacks usually target web applications and attempt to make unwanted changes on server data or extract sensitive information from a web application. Attackers do this by luring an authenticated user into making a specially crafted web request. It’s important, regardless of role, for everyone to have a basic understanding of CSRF attacks and the available options to protect against them.

For more information about basic CSRF concepts and potential mitigations, see our new Applied Mitigation Bulletin Understanding Cross-Site Request Forgery Threat Vectors. Although this document does not attempt to provide all the technical details associated with CSRF, it does aim to summarize the CSRF technique and provide methods that can be potentially used by developers, network administrators and users to protect against CSRF attacks.

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