CyberGeeksMY: Public Awareness on Website Vulnerability and Proposed Idea of ‘Smuggy’ Prototype

Abstract

The needs on online-based activities are increasing tremendously as the worldwide is currently in COVID-19 pandemic situation and most people are being bounded to stay at home. Society is forced to learn and adapt with this new normal in all aspects of life from running businesses, conducting online classes and meetings, buying stuffs and communicating with families and friends. This causes high dependency on web applications. The idea of proposing ‘Smuggy’ prototype has emerged to provide relevant skillsets for web penetration testers specifically and web developers in general. In order to realize the idea, a survey was conducted to gauge for public awareness on website vulnerability as the first part of this research. The scope of survey is on public concerns when browsing reputable websites vs. unfamiliar new ones, which further down to know the reasons why the respondents feel as such. Another part of the survey was to find out the respondents’ knowledge on related events of compromised websites and their encounter in discovering web vulnerabilities. With these data as research basis, ‘Smuggy’ prototype is designed with a focus to educate users about the OWASP top 10 web vulnerabilities so that the vulnerabilities found in today’s web applications can be minimized.