Applications have become the lifeblood for most businesses, enabling essential operations, customer interactions, data processing and more. Nevertheless, this reliance on apps also creates attractive targets for cybercriminals looking to steal sensitive data, disrupt services or hold companies for ransom.
As hackers continually evolve their tactics for breaching apps and systems, comprehensive application protection needs to be a top priority. The folk at Hillstone Networks (https://www.hillstonenet.com/) say that by implementing robust security practices throughout the entire app lifecycle, you can safeguard your critical business assets and data.
Embedding Security from Day One
To effectively protect your business applications against this expansive threat landscape, security needs to be embedded into the entire software development lifecycle – from initial design through ongoing maintenance.
Some key application protection practices to implement include:
- Requirements Mapping: Define security requirements upfront mapping to regulations, standards, and security policies to drive implementation.
- Threat Modeling: Identify potential threats and attack vectors each application may be susceptible to based on its architecture and functionality.
- Secure Code Training: Instruct development teams on secure coding methodologies, tactics used by attackers, and how to avoid common vulnerabilities by design.
- Static/Dynamic Testing: Use static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST) tools to analyze code and running applications for flaws.
- Penetration Testing: Simulate real-world attacks by having security experts ethically attempt to hack the application before production release.
- Automated Pipelines: Integrate app security testing and authorization workflows into CI/CD pipelines to bake protection into the development lifecycle.
- Dependency Scanning: Check all third-party libraries, components, and container images used for known vulnerabilities prior to production build.
- Encryption Everywhere: Protect sensitive data through encryption at rest, in transit and in-use across all application components and data flows.
Proactively embedding application protection practices upfront means you reduce the likelihood of vulnerabilities being introduced and lingering into production environments.
Securing the Production Environment
While application security must start at the source, protection requirements don’t stop once apps are deployed into production. Safeguarding your business-critical apps requires maintaining a secure perimeter around them.
- Runtime Application Self-Protection: Implement security monitoring, attack detection and shielding capabilities at the app runtime layer itself.
- API Security Management: Control access, inspect payload contents and enforce security policies for all application programming interface traffic.
- Web Application Firewalls: Intelligent web traffic inspection to automatically filter out OWASP Top 10 and other common web application threats.
- Interactive Application Security Testing: Continuously scan running applications for the latest disclosed vulnerabilities and misconfigurations to prioritize patches.
- Micro-segmentation: Isolate and restrict app communications within zero-trust secure boundaries to limit potential spread of threats.
Deploying these environment-level protection measures in tandem with application security practices means you establish a multi-layered defensive posture.
Continued Testing and Monitoring
Consistent monitoring and testing is so crucial – both at the application layer itself and the production environment around it. Utilize the following:
- Web Application Scanning: Regularly scan all web-facing applications for vulnerabilities, policy compliance violations, and other risk indicators.
- Application Security Monitoring: Capture security telemetry from running apps and containers to detect suspicious activities or behaviors.
- Interactive Application Penetration Testing: Routinely use ethical hackers to evaluate your production environment’s resiliency using real-world tactics.
- Threat Intelligence Integration: Keep current on the latest disclosed vulnerabilities and common attack patterns to stay ahead of rapidly evolving threats.
Adopting an offensive mindset and continuously validating the resiliency of your defenses means you will stay better positioned to quickly identify and mitigate emerging application-level threats.
Conclusion
Defending your business-critical apps isn’t just a strategic priority; it’s an existential imperative. The investments required are well worth mitigating the devastating effects of downtime, data breaches, application sabotage, and other compromises. Secure your applications for longevity and continued growth.
