Introduction

Maintaining web security has become difficult for web developers and cybersecurity experts. Intruders try to breach web security and gain unauthorized access to web systems for many different purposes, such as :

  • To steal sensitive data

  • To disrupt competitors’ operations

  • To damage competitors’ reputations

  • To commit fraud for financial gain

  • To spread false news and propaganda

In order to avoid such harmful events, developers need to consider many constraints while developing a website.

Types of web security attacks

In the sections below, different types of web security attacks are described.

Distributed denial-of-service

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is an attack on a particular machine in which multiple unfamiliar systems with different IP addresses are deployed. These distributed systems are stimulated in such a way that legitimate traffic is generated toward the targeted system. The objective of the DDoS attack is to overpopulate the targeted system in such a way that it can’t handle legitimate requests.

Preventing DDoS attacks can be quite a cumbersome task. To prevent DDoS attacks, some precautions can be taken, which include the following:

  • Applying CAPTCHAs

  • Using different types of firewalls

  • Blacklisting the IP addresses

  • Load balancing the requests

Laravel provides some built-in middleware to prevent DDoS attacks. Middleware is a filtering mechanism between a web system’s request and response. Laravel provides middleware named Throttle that allows developers to control several allowed requests at a particular time for a specific route against an IP address.

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