Following a high-priority security incident, you, as an Incident Responder at a Cyber Incident Response...

Directory Traversal is the technique most directly aligned with “manipulating URL paths to access files and directories outside the web root.” Attackers abuse path sequences (for example, patterns like “../”) or encoded variants to move upward in a directory structure and reach restricted locations such as configuration files, credentials, or system files. In SOC investigations, repeated attempts to request “outside-root” paths in web logs (often with URL encoding, double encoding, or mixed separators) is a classic indicator of traversal probing and exploitation. This differs from SQL injection, which targets database queries and typically shows payloads manipulating SQL syntax (quotes, UNION, tautologies, time delays) rather than filesystem path navigation. XSS focuses on injecting scripts into web pages to run in a victim’s browser, so the log artifacts are more about injected JavaScript/HTML payloads and reflected/stored contexts. Cookie poisoning is a session attack involving tampering with session tokens or cookie values, which shows up as abnormal cookie parameters rather than path traversal requests. Given the explicit evidence of path manipulation to reach unauthorized directories, Directory Traversal is the best match and should drive mitigations such as strict input validation, canonical path checks, least-privilege file permissions, and WAF rules.