How do you educate and train your IIS developers and users on CSRF risks and mitigation?

1 What is CSRF and how does it work?

CSRF exploits the trust between your IIS server and the user's browser. When a user visits your IIS application, they may receive a cookie or a token that identifies them as a valid user. This cookie or token is sent along with every request to your IIS server, as a way of verifying the user's identity and authorization. However, if the user also visits a malicious website or clicks on a malicious link or image, that website or script can send a request to your IIS server using the same cookie or token, without the user's awareness or consent. This request can perform any action that the user is allowed to do, such as changing their password, transferring funds, or deleting data.

2 What are the consequences of CSRF attacks?

CSRF attacks can have serious implications for your IIS applications and users. Depending on the request, they can alter or delete data, exposing sensitive information, performing unauthorized transactions or operations, and taking over user accounts or sessions. This could affect the integrity, availability, confidentiality, privacy, accountability, auditability, authentication, and authorization of your application and users.

3 How can you prevent CSRF attacks?

In order to protect against CSRF attacks, it is necessary to implement security measures on the IIS server and instruct users on how to avoid them. Anti-CSRF tokens or headers, same-site cookies, HTTPS and HSTS protocols, and user education are all best practices for preventing CSRF attacks. Anti-CSRF tokens or headers involve generating unique and random values from the IIS server and sending them to the user's browser with each response. The user must send back the same token or header with each request as a way of verifying that the request originated from the IIS application. Same-site cookies are only sent to the IIS server if the request is from the same domain as the IIS application, blocking cross-domain requests from using user cookies for malicious purposes. HTTPS and HSTS protocols encrypt and secure communication between the IIS server and browser, while user education should involve informing users about risks and signs of CSRF attacks, as well as how to avoid them such as logging out of applications when done, clearing browser cache and cookies regularly, avoiding clicking suspicious links or images, using different browsers or devices for different activities, and using antivirus and firewall software.

4 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?