312-39 · Question #6
Following a high-priority security incident, you, as an Incident Responder at a Cyber Incident Response firm, initiate an internal investigation after reports confirm a serious data breach in which…
The correct answer is B. Directory Traversal. Directory Traversal is the technique most directly aligned with “manipulating URL paths to access files and directories outside the web root.” Attackers abuse path sequences (for example, patterns like “../”) or encoded variants to move upward in a directory structure and reach…
Question
Following a high-priority security incident, you, as an Incident Responder at a Cyber Incident Response firm, initiate an internal investigation after reports confirm a serious data breach in which sensitive customer data, including payment details and personal information, was stolen from a critical web server. You begin analyzing the server logs to reconstruct the attack timeline and identify how the attacker gained access. During your investigation, you discover suspicious activity in the logs, including repeated requests attempting to access files and directories outside of the web server’s root directory. Some of these requests appear to be manipulating URL paths to navigate into restricted system files-a behavior that is often associated with web-based exploits. You suspect that a vulnerability in the web server was exploited to bypass security restrictions and access unauthorized directories, potentially exposing sensitive configurations and credentials. However, you still need to confirm the exact technique used. Which type of web application attack might have caused this incident?
Options
- ACross-Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks
- BDirectory Traversal
- CSQL Injection Attack
- DSession Attacks: Cookie Poisoning
How the community answered
(30 responses)- A7% (2)
- B70% (21)
- C7% (2)
- D17% (5)
Explanation
Directory Traversal is the technique most directly aligned with “manipulating URL paths to access files and directories outside the web root.” Attackers abuse path sequences (for example, patterns like “../”) or encoded variants to move upward in a directory structure and reach restricted locations such as configuration files, credentials, or system files. In SOC investigations, repeated attempts to request “outside-root” paths in web logs (often with URL encoding, double encoding, or mixed separators) is a classic indicator of traversal probing and exploitation. This differs from SQL injection, which targets database queries and typically shows payloads manipulating SQL syntax (quotes, UNION, tautologies, time delays) rather than filesystem path navigation. XSS focuses on injecting scripts into web pages to run in a victim’s browser, so the log artifacts are more about injected JavaScript/HTML payloads and reflected/stored contexts. Cookie poisoning is a session attack involving tampering with session tokens or cookie values, which shows up as abnormal cookie parameters rather than path traversal requests. Given the explicit evidence of path manipulation to reach unauthorized directories, Directory Traversal is the best match and should drive mitigations such as strict input validation, canonical path checks, least-privilege file permissions, and WAF rules.
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