Web Vulnerability Study of Online Pharmacy Sites

Consumers are increasingly using online pharmacies, but these sites may not provide an adequate level of security with the consumers’ personal data. There is a gap in this research addressing the problems of security vulnerabilities in this industry. The objective is to identify the level of web application security vulnerabilities in online pharmacies and the common types of flaws, thus expanding on prior studies. Technical, managerial and legal recommendations on how to mitigate security issues are presented. The proposed four-step method first consists of choosing an online testing tool. The next steps involve choosing a list of 60 online pharmacy sites to test, and then running the software analysis to compile a list of flaws. Finally, an in-depth analysis is performed on the types of web application vulnerabilities. The majority of sites had serious vulnerabilities, with the majority of flaws being cross-site scripting or old versions of software that have not been updated. A method is proposed for the securing of web pharmacy sites, using a multi-phased approach of technical and managerial techniques together with a thorough understanding of national legal requirements for securing systems

Web servers under overload: How scheduling can help

This article provides a detailed implementation study on the behavior of web serves that serve static requests where the load fluctuates over time (transient overload). Various external factors are considered, including WAN delays and losses and different client behavior models. We find that performance can be dramatically improved via a kernel-level modification to the web server to change the scheduling policy at the server from the standard FAIR (processor-sharing) scheduling to SRPT (shortest-remaining-processing-time) scheduling. We find that SRPT scheduling induces no penalties. In particular, throughput is not sacrificed and requests for long files experience only negligibly higher response times under SRPT than they did under the original FAIR scheduling