The Evolving Threat Landscape of Web Applications and IT Systems

The threat landscape surrounding web applications and IT systems is becoming increasingly sophisticated. While traditional attacks such as SQL injections, cross-site scripting, and session hijacking remain active in 2025, they have been significantly mitigated through modern web frameworks, web application firewalls (WAF), and adherence to best practices.

However, have you ever heard of attacks that don’t aim to steal or manipulate confidential data? There are also attacks that solely focus on taking IT systems offline for as long as possible and maximizing the damage to those affected.

In this article, we will examine one such malicious attack method, which reached a new dimension in 2013 with the traffic spikes on spamhaus.org. Five years later, GitHub experienced a DDoS attack with an astonishing data rate of 1.35 Tbps. These kinds of attacks are not isolated incidents – any company or organization could be affected tomorrow.

Sources

1. Spamhaus History (accessed on 14.09.2024)
2. GitHub DDoS Incident Report (accessed on 03.09.2024)

„The power of artificial intelligence is so incredible that it will change society in profound ways.“

(Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft)

What Are Our Guidelines for the Use of AI?

It’s the year 2024. The hype surrounding LLMs and ChatGPT started a year ago and is now having an initial impact on software development. AI chatbots can not only generate texts, draw photorealistic images, create music or answer questions — they can now also generate functioning programs in a programming language that even work. And through continuous learning, they are getting better and better at what they do. This is a powerful technology and so far there are hardly any regulations or legal guidelines for the use of these tools. So it’s time to start thinking about guard rails for the creation and use of this extremely powerful technology. Because one thing is clear: AI will be integrated into all kinds of products in the future and will therefore have a major impact on all our lives.

To really show the scale that will be upon us with the dawn of the AI age, I would like to quote here from a TED talk by Mustafa Suleyman:

“With that in mind, I offer the following metaphor today to help us grapple with what this moment [the widespread adoption of AI] really is. I think AI is best understood as something like a new digital species. Please don’t take this too literally, but I predict that we will see them as digital companions, new partners in our life journeys. Whether you believe we are on a 10‑, 20- or 30-year journey, I think this is the most accurate and fundamentally honest way to describe what is actually coming.”

And an important insight from him is: “We can only control what we can understand”. So what do we need to do to understand this?

“Nothing is as constant as change.”
(Heraclitus of Ephesus, 535–475 BC)

„A good software architect is like a werewolf: Afraid of silver bullets.“

(loosely based on Jochen Mader (codepitbull))