Ten Ways to Ensure Web Application Security

Analytics Insight ran a recent article on the “Ten ways to ensure web application security,” a good reminder that there are many steps an organization can take to ensure security for their web applications in the face of larger numbers of attacks and increasingly sophisticated attacks.  If you haven’t started looking at your web application security in more detail, the article provides a nice framework for setting up your plans and giving you a place to begin your journey.

The article gives additional color to each one of these 10 areas where you can give web application security additional focus.  Make sure you check out the whole article for additional information.  The ten areas to focus on for web application security are:

1. Create a web application security blueprint
2. Track your Assets
3. Perform a threat assessment
4. Make security everyone’s priority
5. Back-up website data
6. Introduce a bounty program
7. Encrypt your data
8. Scan your website for vulnerabilities
9. Automate and integrate security tools
10. Train the employees

While each of these are important areas to provide additional focus on for web application security, there are also some easy places to improve web application security as well.  The first one is just making sure all the software and operating systems in your web application environment are running the latest software revisions and are fully patched.  It sounds simple, but it’s probably one of the most effective things you can do to improve the security of your web applications. In fact, most experts recommend updating as the fastest and easiest course of action to remove risk from vulnerabilities in production.  Unfortunately while this sounds good in theory, we often see, that it’s a lot harder to implement in practice, since many successful attacks are based in vulnerabilities that have existing patches.

With the increase in cyber attacks and the advanced nature of these threats, especially those that attack web applications, organizations may need to put additional focus as described in this new article on their approach to web application security.

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Another area though that may be overlooked when implementing a framework like this one, is making sure to protect applications that are likely to have vulnerabilities that can be exploited (including known – ones yet to be patched and unknown vulnerabilities).  While many organizations already have system and network based security, it’s important to remember to have a complete security framework that offers a defense-in-depth architecture.  Maybe it’s time to take a hint from the recent finalization of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s SP800-53 that was just released on September 23, 2020.  The new security and privacy framework standard now requires Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) as an added layer of protection in the security framework.

RASP solutions like the one from K2 Cyber Security offer significant application protection, including protection of vulnerable applications, while at the same time using minimal resources and adding negligible latency to an application.  K2 Security Platform uses runtime deterministic security to monitor the application and has a deep understanding of the application’s control flows, DNA and execution.  By validating the application’s control flows, deterministic security is based on the application itself, rather than relying on past attacks to determine a zero day attack.  Deterministic security results in the detection of sophisticated zero day attacks and also protects from application from the risks listed in the OWASP Top Ten, including XSS and SQL Injection.

K2’s Next Generation Application Workload Protection Platform addresses today’s need for runtime security in an easy to use, easy to deploy solution.  K2’s unique deterministic security detects new attacks without the need to rely on past attack knowledge, is lightweight, and adds under a millisecond of latency to the running application.  To aid in quick remediation of vulnerabilities, K2 also provides detailed attack telemetry including the code module and line number being in the code being attacked, while at the same time integrating with leading firewalls to do real time attacker blocking.

Change how you protect your applications, and check out K2’s web application and application workload security solution and evaluate K2’s effectiveness at detecting and protecting your organization from attacks.

Find out more about K2 today by requesting a demo, or get your free trial.