ModSecurity Breach

ModSecurity v2.5 is now available. Some of the new features include: parallel text matching, Geo IP resolution, credit card number detection, support for content injection, automated rule updates, scripting, as well as many others.
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News and Updates

Trustwave Acquires Breach Security
(June 22, 2010)
Trustwave has acquired Breach Security, the company behind ModSecurity. Please see the press release for more information.

ModSecurity v2.5.12
(Feb 4, 2010)
ModSecurity v2.5.12 (change log) has been released. This release fixes several important issues to help prevent a detection bypass and denial of service attacks against ModSecurity. Many thanks to the Sogeti/ESEC R&D team for sending us the results of their code review. In addition, this release fixes quite a few small but notable bugs and includes the latest Core Ruleset (v2.0.5).

ModSecurity v2.5.11
(Nov 6, 2009)
ModSecurity v2.5.11 (change log) has been released. This release fixes a multipart parsing issue that has the potential to allow bypassing the rules engine. This bypass can be avoided via some simple rules, however. Other changes include a rules update (CRS 2.0.3) and some minor cleanup in build, mlogc, persistence and the output filter ordering.

ModSecurity v2.5.10
(Sep 24, 2009)
ModSecurity v2.5.10 (change log) has been released. This release fixes a number of small issues. Notable issues that have been fixed are a cleaner build process, fixes to mlogc to build on Windows and allow more reliable SSL neg. to the console, less verbose logging when using anomaly scoring with CRS v2.x and a feature to allow easier use with Apache mpm-itk.


Books from the ModSecurity Contributors

ModSecurity Handbook cover

ModSecurity Handbook is "The definitive guide to the popular open source web application firewall", written by Ivan Ristic (original author of ModSecurity). The book is available from Feisty Duck in hardcopy or with immediate access to the digital version which is continually updated.

Apache Security cover

Apache Security is a comprehensive Apache Security resource, written by Ivan Ristic for O'Reilly. Two chapters (Apache Installation and Configuration and PHP) are available as free download, as are the Apache security tools created for the book.

Preventing Web Attacks with Apache cover

Preventing Web Attacks with Apache. Building on his groundbreaking SANS presentations on Apache security, Ryan C. Barnett reveals why your Web servers represent such a compelling target, how significant exploits are performed, and how they can be defended against.

What Is ModSecurity?

ModSecurity is a web application firewall that can work either embedded or as a reverse proxy. It provides protection from a range of attacks against web applications and allows for HTTP traffic monitoring, logging and real-time analysis.

It is also an open source project that aims to make the web application firewall technology available to everyone.

Support/Mailing lists

Community support is available on the mod-security-users/lists.sourceforge.net mailing list. You must subscribe first (by clicking here) in order to post. The list archives are available as News (NNTP), Threaded HTTP, Bloggy HTTP, and RSS.

Commercial support and appliances based on ModSecurity can be obtained from Breach Security.

Breach

Getting Started

 ModSecurity FAQ
Web Intrusion Detection with ModSecurity (ApacheCon Europe 2008)
Introducing ModSecurity
Introducing Core Rules
ModSecurity 2 Deployment
ModSecurity 2 Rule Language
Securing Web Services with ModSecurity 2
Ajax Fingerprinting and Filtering with ModSecurity 2

External Links

ModSecurity 2.0 with Ivan Ristic
ModSecurity is an open source web application firewall that runs as an Apache module, and version 2.0 offers many new features and improvements. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed Ivan Ristic to discuss the new logging system, events tracking and correlation, filtering AJAX or AFLAX applications, and just-in-time patching for closed source applications.

Web Application Firewalls Primer
Introduction to Web Application Firewalls, published in INSECURE Magazine 1.5.

Talks

Our talks are available for download following the links below:

Web Application Firewalls:
When Are They Useful?
(May 31, 2006)
ModSecurity Elevator Pitch
(February 20, 2006)
Threat Modelling for Web Applications
(January 27, 2006)
Apache Security Training
(October 27, 2005)
Web Intrusion Detection with ModSecurity
(October 27, 2005)
ModSecurity Status
Stable: 2.5.12 (4 Feb 2010)
Development: -

ModSecurity Blog

Aug 31, 2010
Advanced Feature of the Week: Transformation Functions
This week's feature is the effective use of Transformation functions. Reference Manual This excerpt is taken from the updated Reference Manual section of Ivan Ristic's book ModSecurity Handbook. Transformation functions are used to alter input data before it is used...

Aug 30, 2010
OWASP ModSecurity CRS Project Promoted to Release Quality
I am excited to announce that the OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set (CRS) has completed its official review and has been promoted to a Release Quality Project! I want to thank both Ivan Ristic and Leonardo Cavallari Militelli who served...

Aug 27, 2010
OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set (CRS) v2.0.8 Released
Greetings everyone, I wanted to announce the availability of the OWASP ModSecurity CRS v2.0.8. DOWNLOADING - Download page - http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_ModSecurity_Core_Rule_Set_Project#tab=Download You can also use the util/rules-updater.pl script to auto-download the latest ZIP archive (see the rules-updater-example.conf file for Repo data)....

Aug 24, 2010
Advanced Feature of the Week: Validating Byte Ranges
We are starting a new blog post series here on the ModSecurity site called "Advanced Feature of the Week" where we will be highlighting many of ModSecurity's really cool capabilities. These are the features that seldom used or fully understood...

Aug 11, 2010
What's up @ ModSecurity?
Since Black Hat and DEFCON we have been busying building teams and aligning objectives over here at Trustwave's SpiderLabs. We are committed to driving innovation into the development of ModSecurity for the future. Here are are few things that we...