View Infographic: Application Security 101
Digital transformation is an important step that organizations need to take to keep up with evolving industry landscapes. As the world currently grapples with the disruption brought about by the coronavirus pandemic, the need for such a transformation has become not only more apparent but also more urgent. With businesses pivoting their digital footprints and modernizing processes for their employees to work from anywhere, organizations are also having to reconsider how they meet customer demands and streamline change. This digital transformation has already become evident in the last few months, with the use of applications experiencing a notable surge across various sectors.
Applications now play an integral role, with many businesses and users relying on a wide range of applications for work, education, entertainment, retail, and other uses. In this current reality, development teams play a key role in ensuring that applications can provide users great usability and performance as well as security from threat actors who are always on the lookout for weaknesses, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other security gaps that they can abuse to conduct malicious activities. Security risks have become even more pronounced as organizations have had to rush applications to market in order to maintain business and revenue-generating processes. The privacy risks posed by recently rolled out contact tracing applications best exemplify the perils of rushing application development and deployment. In May, The Washington Post reported that contact tracing applications, while useful for governments and researchers in their efforts to contain the pandemic outbreak, can inadvertently provide hackers sensitive details of people who tested positive for Covid-19.
The serious risks posed by unsecure applications highlight the need for application security or the process of finding, fixing, and enhancing the security of applications in the design, development, and post-deployment phase. This article discusses the security risks and threats that applications could be susceptible to, how organizations can integrate adequate cybersecurity protections in their DevOps pipeline, and more.
The increasing complexity of applications and their reliance on third-party libraries, among other concerns, make them vulnerable to security risks and threats. Security professionals revealed that majority of external attacks are carried out through exploiting a software vulnerability or a web application, as stated in a 2020 Forrester report. The same report describes open-source software as a main concern in the security of applications, citing the 50% increase of open-source security vulnerabilities since last year.
The increased adoption of containers and necessity of APIs have also introduced new risks to applications. A 2020 Snyk report reveals that nine out of the top 10 official container images in Docker Hub contained more than 50 vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, a 2019 F5 report found API breaches that emerged from large platforms that offer many third-party integrations, mobile applications, and application misconfigurations.
The list below details the most common risks to applications that software developers should be mindful of in order to secure the code they produce. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Foundation has a comprehensive list of risks for web applications and APIs. It is important that developers are aware of the most common application security risks – ones that usually result from unsecure code – so they can check the bases they need to cover at each stage of the development pipeline.
Security has a tendency to become an afterthought for developers working in traditional development teams because they are too focused on building applications and meeting release dates. Traditional processes result in insufficient security and communication gaps between development and security teams, and, in turn, pose the risk of huge financial losses to businesses due to data breaches. In addition, vulnerabilities uncovered in the implementation phase could cost over six times more to remedy than the ones spotted in the design phase, according to research by IBM.
To build secure applications, development teams should integrate adequate cybersecurity layers that conduct analysis in the container, source code, and dependencies, among other components. In particular, these are the cybersecurity layers they need to look into:
With the world increasingly relying on applications for a myriad of purposes, organizations are tasked to build applications that are secure enough to withstand a variety of risks and threats that they could be exposed to. Below are some best practices to follow to ensure that applications are developed securely. While some of these practices focus on the adoption of tools for scanning and testing, other practices also entail the encouragement of a culture that prioritizes data privacy and security.
Following these best practices can help organizations strengthen their approach to application security. As illustrated previously, it is imperative for organizations to perform regular scanning and employ advanced security tools to detect malware, vulnerabilities, and other threats. Furthermore, they should also implement policies that enable a strong security culture – one that empowers development and security teams through training and saves organizations from paying hefty fines by ensuring that applications remain compliant with data protection mandates.
The Trend Micro Cloud One™ security services platform, which powers Trend Micro™ Hybrid Cloud Security, enables software developers to build and run applications their way. It has security controls that work across existing infrastructure or modern code streams, development toolchains, and multiplatform requirements.
Application Security, which is offered by Cloud One, provides full diagnostic details about code vulnerabilities and runtime protection against automated attacks and the most common threats like SQL injection and RCE. It also offers complete coverage and reporting of every attack instance, as well as insight into an attacker’s identity and attack methodology.
Cloud One also offers the following cloud security technologies to further help developers identify and resolve security issues sooner and improve delivery time for DevOps teams:
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