Security is vital in every part of a business. You can save a ton of time and money by doing this. Every business undoubtedly contains sensitive information that must be protected. Mainly, software applications are the weakest link in the business stack’s security. According to Forrester’s The State of Application Security, most external harm is carried out through a software vulnerability of 35% or a web application of 32%.
In this article, we provide you with the most common application threats and review best practices to overcome the potential risks that you can face through the lifecycle.
Common Application Threats and Vulnerabilities
Multiple hazards and vulnerabilities can compromise the security and integrity of applications. Understanding these threats is essential for implementing effective protections against them. Here are a few of the most prevalent hazards and vulnerabilities applications face:
- Supply Chain Risks. Applications frequently import and utilize libraries and code from third parties. Supply chain attacks, which exploit vulnerabilities in these libraries or incorporate malicious code into them, pose an increasing risk to application security.
- Account Takeover. In applications, access to confidential information or privileged features is often granted to user and administrator accounts. Inadequate account security — including weak passwords, phishing assaults, etc. — enables assailants to gain access to these accounts and abuse their privileges to access data or otherwise harm the organization.
- Injection Vulnerabilities. It arises when an application fails to correctly validate and sanitize user input. This can result in data loss, remote code execution (RCE), and additional problems.
- Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks. The accessibility of internal and external applications is essential for employee productivity and consumer satisfaction. Denial of Service attacks that exploit an application’s vulnerabilities or overwhelm it with traffic can render it inaccessible to authorized users.
- Leaks of Sensitive Data. Applications may leak important user and company data due to cryptography mistakes, verbose logs, and other problems. This information can be used to perpetrate deception against users or to aid in future assaults.
Top 5 Application Security Best Practices
Ensuring the security of applications is crucial to protect sensitive data, maintaining user trust, and preventing unauthorized access. By following these top application security best practices, you can significantly enhance the security posture of your applications:
#1. Begin with a threat assessment
Applications may be exposed to a broad range of dangers. To correctly prioritize repair measures, it is important to understand the possible threats to which an application may be subject.
An excellent technique to determine the most probable risks to an organization, their possible effects, and what security measures the firm currently has in place is to conduct a threat assessment. Using this knowledge, an organization may plan to deal with these possible risks and hazards.
#2. Employ best practices for DevSecOps
Incorporating security early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is the main goal of the DevSecOps or Shift Security Left movement. DevSecOps incorporates the following instead of leaving security to the SDLC’s Testing phase:
Specifying Security Requirements: The development team specifies the many features that an application must have during the requirements phase of the SDLC. This should also contain security requirements that specify the security measures that must be taken, the possible vulnerabilities that must be addressed in the code, and functionality and performance requirements.
Making Test Cases: Developers often make test cases to assess how well an application adheres to specifications. The team may develop test cases to ensure that security requirements are implemented correctly after they have been defined.
Testing Automation: One of the fundamental principles of DevOps and DevSecOps is to automate wherever feasible. Static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), and interactive application security testing (IAST) are examples of application security tools that can be automated to help with friction reduction and ensure that security testing is carried out throughout the SDLC.
One of the biggest causes of vulnerabilities in production code is that security is underestimated throughout the development phase. To address this and lower the risk to an organization’s applications, DevSecOps concepts are used.
#3. Control privileges
The management of privileged access (PAM) is crucial throughout the development process. An attacker who gains access to a company’s development environment may be able to:
access the paperwork of the policies and procedures that include private information;
change the program code to add flaws, mistakes, or harmful code;
create security flaws in test cases and test code;
disable security testing that is automated;
adapt security tool settings.
The data and application security of an organization might suffer from any of these occurrences. Strong authentication employing multi-factor authentication (MFA) and strong access restrictions based on the least privilege principle limits the likelihood that an attacker will be able to access development environments and the harm they may do with that access.
#4. Observe the Software Supply Chain
To implement specific functionality, the majority, if not all, of apps, depend on third-party libraries and components. Secure code reuse is a frequent development best practice since writing code from scratch takes more time and might lead to less performant and secure code. However, attacks on the software supply chain are becoming more frequent. Commonly used libraries may be the target of cyber threat actors who also can introduce vulnerabilities or malicious code into the libraries themselves.
Strong application security requires effective software supply chain management. By identifying the libraries and outside code utilized by an application, software composition analysis (SCA) tools may aid in controlling supply chain risks. Development teams may find any known vulnerabilities on this list, patch them, and update any out-of-date components by using it.
#5. Leverage Automation and AI
Teams in charge of development and security often have extensive duties and constrained time frames. Due to the time and resources, it requires, security is sometimes devalued throughout the development process to fulfill release deadlines.
Security automation and artificial intelligence may assist in lowering the number of resources needed for security throughout development. AI may aid in the interpretation of warnings and log files to minimize false positives while bringing concerns to the attention of developers and security experts. While limiting the burden and effect that tests have on developers and release schedules, security automation makes sure that tests are performed.
Conclusion
Without the proper instruments, a well-designed application security program is worthless. A central tenet of DevSecOps is to integrate and automate security in CI/CD pipelines whenever practicable. This decreases security friction and expedites the identification and resolution of vulnerabilities and security issues.
Security must be considered and prioritized. This implies that you should prioritize protecting your company from the actual risks it faces.
