What you'll learn

A fundamental component of many modern day applications is the ability to create and manage user accounts. So many of the services we use every day as consumers and build as developers depend on the ability for customers to register, login, and then perform tasks under their identity. However, every day we see a barrage of attacks against poorly implemented account management facilities. These range from brute force attacks against the login to the impersonation of authenticated users, to the cracking of breached passwords. Often, weaknesses in account management facilities are simply due to the developers not having thought through the potential risks from a hacker's mindset. This course demonstrates how attackers think and exploit these weaknesses. There are numerous high-profile precedents including the celebrity iCloud photo hack, GitHub account attacks and Dropbox credential disclosure. In some of these cases, oversights in secure account management practices left systems unnecessarily vulnerable whilst in others, good practices undoubtedly mitigated the scale of the damage caused. This course regularly refers to real world examples – both good and bad – as a means of illustrating risks and the effectiveness of security controls.