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Web Application Incident Response

24/7 Emergency Hotline for web application incidents: 1 (833) 562-5273

If exploitation is active: improper containment can destroy evidence or allow attackers to persist. Web application incidents require careful response to stop abuse without breaking production systems.

Web application incident response focuses on detecting, containing, investigating, and remediating security incidents that impact public or internal web applications. These incidents often involve active exploitation, data exposure risk, credential abuse, or persistence mechanisms embedded at the application layer.

What Web Application Incident Response Is

Web application incident response focuses on identifying, containing, and remediating attacks targeting web applications, APIs, and backend services. These incidents often involve exploitation of application logic, authentication flaws, insecure APIs, or injection vulnerabilities.

Web application incident response investigation showing application abuse, API attacks, and data exposure analysis — Web application incident response investigation involving application abuse, API exploitation, and data exposure analysis.

Unlike endpoint-focused incidents, web application attacks often blend legitimate traffic with malicious behavior, requiring careful log analysis and correlation across application, identity, and infrastructure layers.

A web application incident occurs when attackers exploit weaknesses in application logic, authentication, authorization, input handling, or underlying infrastructure. Unlike endpoint malware, web app attacks often blend into normal traffic and can persist quietly while attackers steal data or maintain access.

Many ransomware, data breach, and insider threat cases begin with an initial compromise of a web application. Treating these incidents as simple vulnerability issues often allows attackers to remain embedded.

Common Web Application Attack Scenarios

SQL injection and data extraction

Abuse of unsafe queries to extract customer data, credentials, or internal records.

Authentication bypass

Exploiting weak session handling, token reuse, or logic flaws to gain unauthorized access.

Web shells and persistence

Upload or injection of backdoors that provide long-term command execution.

API abuse

Excessive data access or privilege escalation through insecure APIs.

Cross-site scripting and session theft

Stealing cookies or tokens to impersonate users or admins.

Supply chain or dependency compromise

Malicious libraries, plugins, or third-party integrations embedded in the app.

High-Signal Indicators Of Web Application Compromise

Web application incidents are confirmed through correlation between application logs, infrastructure telemetry, and identity activity. High-confidence indicators include:

Unusual or automated request patterns against sensitive endpoints
Unexpected database queries or large response payloads
Creation or modification of server-side files without deployment activity
New admin accounts or privilege changes originating from the application
Outbound connections from web servers to unknown external hosts
Authentication tokens reused across different IP addresses or devices

Important: blocking traffic without investigation can remove visibility. Evidence preservation matters just as much as containment.

Our Web Application Incident Response Process

Lockard Security follows a structured response approach aligned with NIST 800-61 and modern application security practices. The goal is to stop exploitation, confirm impact, and eliminate attacker access safely.

1) Rapid triage

Validate alerts, confirm exploitation, and identify affected applications and users.

2) Containment

Targeted controls using WAF rules, routing changes, or feature isolation without full outages.

3) Investigation

Log analysis, timeline reconstruction, and identification of attacker actions and data access.

4) Threat removal

Removal of web shells, malicious code, injected logic, and compromised credentials.

5) Recovery

Secure redeployment, validation, and monitoring before restoring full service.

6) Hardening

Application security improvements, logging enhancements, and abuse detection controls.

Platforms And Technologies We Commonly Investigate

Custom web applications and APIs
Cloud-hosted apps on AWS, Azure, and GCP
Containers, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines
Identity integrations with Entra ID, Okta, and OAuth providers
Databases, object storage, and backend services
Web servers, load balancers, and WAF platforms

24/7 Web Application Incident Response

If you suspect your web application is being exploited or data is at risk, contact us immediately. Early containment often prevents full data breaches and regulatory exposure.

24/7 Emergency Hotline: 1 (833) 562-5273
Email: [email protected]
Request Web Application Incident Response