Can you describe a specific instance where you diagnosed and mitigated a CSRF attack?
In a recent project, I identified and mitigated a CSRF attack on our web application. The application was vulnerable as it didn’t validate the origin of requests. Attackers exploited this by tricking users into submitting malicious requests via an image tag embedded in an email.
Upon detecting unusual activity, I analyzed server logs and found multiple suspicious POST requests from different IPs but with similar patterns. This confirmed my suspicion of a CSRF attack.
To mitigate this, I implemented anti-CSRF tokens in our forms. These unique, unpredictable values are associated with each user’s session and included in every state-changing operation. Thus, even if an attacker tricks a user into clicking a link, they can’t predict the token to include in their forged request, preventing the attack.
I also enabled SameSite cookies that only send cookies if the request originated from the same site, further strengthening our defense against CSRF attacks. Post-implementation, we observed no further CSRF attempts.
