File Integrity Monitoring as a Method for Detecting and Preventing Web Defacement Attacks

Abstract

The cybersecurity landscape in Indonesia recorded an increase in cyberattacks in 2022. One of the types of attacks observed was web defacement attacks targeting government websites. In 2022, there were a total of 2,348 web defacement attacks in Indonesia, with the majority occurring in the governmental sector. In proactive efforts to monitor and prevent web defacement attacks, this study implemented the open-source tool Wazuh and activated the file integrity monitoring module to detect file changes in the system. Testing was conducted with two types of attacks: brute force attacks to gain system access and web defacement attacks involving script insertion to trigger alerts from the file integrity monitoring. The results of the testing show that the implementation of Wazuh and the file integrity monitoring module can real-time detect malicious activities and file additions, so that it can be used to mitigate cyberattacks.

Keywords

• brute force attack
• file integrity monitoring
• wazuh
• web defacement