Investigating the current state of securityfor small sized web applications

Abstract: It is not uncommon to read about hacker attacks in the newspaper today. The hackers are targeting governments and enterprises, and motives vary. It may be political or economic reasons, or just to gain reputation. News about smaller systems is, unsurprisingly, not as common. Does this mean that security is less relevant of smaller systems? This report investigates the threat model of smaller web applications, to answer that very question.Different attacks are described in the detail needed for explaining their threat but the intention is not to teach the reader to write secure code. The report does, however, provide the reader with a rich source of references for that purpose. After describing some of the worst threats, the general cloud threat model is analyzed. This is followed by a practical analysis of a cloud system, and the report is closed with general strategies for countering threats.The severe destruction that a successful attack may cause and the high prevalence of those attacks motivates some security practices to be performed whenever software is produced. Attacks against smaller companies are more common now than ever before