Cyber Security is a crucial necessity of the modern world. Cyber Security involves security mechanisms that protect computer network systems from being exploited on their potential vulnerabilities. Sensitive information and confidential data that is stored on the computer systems by users or organizations is an important asset to the respected owners, and the importance of the data thus becomes really important.
Cyber attackers are experienced professionals who are well aware of the norms to break into secure-protected systems and carry out their aim of stealing, manipulating, or deleting confidential data effortlessly. With the increasing cases of cyber-attacks that come into the record each year, knowledge about cyber security and cyber attacks becomes very significant for the internet-using generation.
CSV Files:
- CSV files are Comma Separated Values files or Character Separated Values.
- The separation delimiter includes coma and Collin comma semicolon.
- Microsoft Excel is the most common program to read CSV files.
CSV Injection Attack:
- The mechanism behind the execution of CSV Injection Attack includes malicious websites injecting harmful inputs inside the user CSV files.
- CSV Injection Attack is all the more dangerous as cells beginning with the below characters support this attack: Equal to (=), Addition Operator (+), Subtraction Operator (-), @ Operator.
- When malicious code is entered into the CSV files in the form of a formula, it does the job of running the formula and causing harm to the computer architecture by manipulating user data, providing unauthorized access to the data, or deleting the user data.
- Another form through which CSV Injection attack takes place is via DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange). DDE permits arbitrary code to be executed on the computer system.
Aim:
- CSV Injection Attacks include breaching system security by attacking computer network vulnerability.
- Over-populating malicious content into software like spreadsheets is the harmful aim behind this type of attack.
- CSV Injection Attack is also called formula injection attack as this attack involves the injection of certain harmful characters that act as the formula and get executed in the computer network causing a breach of user privacy.
- All these injected formulas are dangerous software codes and are embedded in CSV as ex-filtered data.
- CSV Injection attacks are so dangerous that they are excluded from bug detecting programs such as bug bounty.
Preventions :
Below listed are some ways to prevent CSV Injection Attacks from cyber attackers:
- Monitor the usage of Input Validation Operators. Operators such as equal to (=), Addition Operator (+), Subtraction Operator (-), and @ Operator should be strictly monitored, and if the unnecessary blockage of these operators must be performed.
- Perform Encoding of CSV Files. The CSV files should be encoded to prevent any manipulation, this can be done by prepending the CSV values with appropriate characters such as space, etc.