New Report Finds 67% of Applications in the Utility Sector Have Serious Vulnerabilities

SiliconAngle reported on a new study from Whitehat Security that found 67% of applications in the utility sector have serious vulnerabilities.  The report found that the “Window of Exposure,” a key metric indicative of breach exposure for applications, has increased from 55% to 67% in the utility sector since the start of the year. The figure makes applications in the utility sector the second most vulnerable to attacks behind public administration applications.

Overall, the report finds, 67% of applications in the utility sector have at least one exploitable severe vulnerability open throughout the year.  In addition, the report indicated the top five vulnerability classes included information leakage, followed by insufficient session expiration, cross-site scripting, insufficient transport layer protection and content spoofing.

Not all industries reported worsening numbers. The Window of Exposure in manufacturing decreased from 70% to 64% over the last 12 months and the figure dropped from 59% to 52% in the healthcare sector.  While that’s good news for the manufacturing and healthcare sectors, the numbers themselves remain high, and indicative a significant exposure to the risk of attack.

Improve Your Application Security Game

If you look at how most organizations implement application security today, there’s two places where security is typically emphasized. With the large number of vulnerabilities we need to re-examine how we do security today.  First let’s look at what a typical organization implements for application security.

Traditional Security during Development (DevSecOps)

First there’s security in pre-production/development, and ideally organizations should be thinking about and implementing security practices during the development of any application.  In the past that meant coding with security in mind and security testing, including SAST (Static Application Security Testing) and DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing).

Traditional Security in Production

The second area organizations should be focusing on security for applications is during production or runtime of the application.  In the past that has meant security in two places.  First the network perimeter, and the use of a web application firewall (WAF), along with the security on the server the application is running on.  Most organizations continue to rely on standard anti-virus or Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions (solutions that are designed for end-user systems, rather than servers) to protect their servers.

Time to Change the Way We Implement Application Security

Since neither of these areas of security focus have been successful at fending off attacks in the recent years, then maybe it’s time to rethink the way organizations approach application security, both during development and in production.  The release of a new NIST SP800-53 Revision 5 Security and Privacy Framework is a good indication that things need to change and gives us insight as to what the next generation of application security is going to look like.

The latest revision of NIST SP800-53 includes the requirement of RASP (Runtime Application Self-Protection) and IAST (Interactive Application Security Testing). It’s a first in recognizing these two advancements in application security by now requiring them as part of the security framework.

Runtime Security for Applications in Production (RASP)

If you’re not familiar with RASP, it’s not a new concept.  The product category has existed since 2012, and came about because of the need for security that is specific to the challenges and threats that web applications face.  If you are thinking the WAF is providing all the application security requirements, you would not be alone, but you would be missing out on many application security needs.  While WAFs have been around in their current form since around 2002, WAFs function as a network perimeter security solution and they have failed to meet the security needs around many of the issues that applications face in today’s threat landscape.  A typical RASP solution has code level visibility into the application and can analyze all the activity related to the application to accurately identify when an attack occurs, thereby reducing the amount of false positives.  Unlike WAFs which only see the traffic coming to and from the server, a RASP can see what’s happening inside the application, to determine if there’s inappropriate use of the application itself.  In addition, RASP is really the first security category to offer self protection for the application.

By running on same server as the application, RASP solutions provide continuous security for the application during runtime.  For example, as mentioned earlier, a RASP solution has complete visibility into the application, so a RASP solution can analyze an application’s execution to validate the execution of the code, and can understand the context of the application’s interactions.

Interactive Security Testing in Development (IAST)

IAST is the other new recommendation for application security coming from the NIST revised draft, and if you haven’t heard of IAST, there’s a good definition available from Optiv:

“IAST is an emerging application security testing approach which combines elements of both of its more established siblings in SAST (Static Application Security Testing) and DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing).  IAST instruments the application binary which can enable both DAST-like confirmation of exploit success and SAST-like coverage of the application code. In some cases, IAST allows security testing as part of general application testing process which provides significant benefits to DevOps approaches. IAST holds the potential to drive tests with fewer false positives/negatives and higher speed than SAST and DAST.”

With these two new requirements (RASP and IAST) for application security being added to the NIST framework, it’s really time to rethink how your organization is doing application security.

Here at K2 Cyber Security, we’d like to help out with your RASP and IAST requirements.  K2 offers an ideal runtime protection security solution that detects true zero-day attacks, while at the same time generates the least false positives and alerts.  Rather than rely on technologies like signatures, heuristics, fuzzy logic, machine learning or AI, we use a deterministic approach to detect true zero-day attacks, without being limited to detecting attacks based on prior attack knowledge.  Deterministic security uses application execution validation, and verifies the API calls are functioning the way the code intended.  There is no use of any prior knowledge about an attack or the underlying vulnerability, which gives our approach the true ability to detect new zero-day attacks. Our technology has 8 patents granted/pending, and has no false alerts.

K2’s technology can also be used with DAST testing tools to provide IAST results during penetration and vulnerability testing.  We’ve also recently published a video, The Need for Deterministic Security.  The video explains why the technologies used in today’s security tools, including web application firewalls (WAFs) fail to prevent zero day attacks and how deterministic security fills the need for detecting zero day attacks.  The video covers why technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, heuristics, fuzzy logic, pattern and signature matching fail to detect true zero day attacks, giving very specific examples of attacks where these technologies work, and where  they fail to detect an attack.

The video also explains why deterministic security works against true zero day attacks and how K2 uses deterministic security.  Watch the video now.

Change how you protect your applications, include RASP and IAST, and check out K2’s application workload security.

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