Web Application Firewalls are widely used in production environments to mitigate security threats like SQL injections. Many industrial products rely on signature-based techniques, but machine learning approaches are becoming more and more popular. The main goal of an adversary is to craft semantically malicious payloads to bypass the syntactic analysis performed by a WAF.In this paper, we present WAF-A-MoLE, a tool that models the presence of an adversary. This tool leverages on a set of mutation operators that alter the syntax of a payload without affecting the original semantics. We evaluate the performance of the tool against existing WAFs, that we trained using our publicly available SQL query dataset. We show that WAF-A-MoLE bypasses all the considered machine learning based WAFs. CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Web application security.

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Sicily (Italy) hosts an ‘endangered’, endemic population of Alectoris graeca whitakeri, commonly known as Sicilian Rock Partridge. An EU-funded Life Natura 2000 project has been founded, involving Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale of Sicily for veterinary aspects: a total of 15 Sicilian Rock Partridge found dead were collected, identified and processed by postmortem examination and laboratory investigations. The evidence of internal parasites was the most relevant finding, showing different types of infections by Nematoda, Cestoda and Coccidia. 60 per cent of these cases were infected with more than one parasite. In one single case, a pathogenic strain of Escherichia coli related to granulocytic lesions in liver was found and another cause of death was due to respiratory disease caused by Aspergillus fumigatus. The study represents the first veterinary report on this rare species and underlines the importance to monitor the health status of wild species in the Italian environment in order to preserve local biodiversity.