How to Avoid Application Security Risks

Application security
The risks caused by poor security management can no longer be thoroughly understood only through some numbers, which usually do not involve actual quantum damage and its chain reaction. Under the pressure of frantically catching up to time to market, application developers may not fully consider data security and user privacy, and only provide enterprises with primary temporary threat prevention tools. When perimeter security motivates insecure code at the application layer, runtime security simply reproduces this attack one step further. After this chaos, how to prevent application security from disappearing into the well-known Bermuda Triangle, namely scope, schedule and budget? Now, let us understand the common application security risks and ways to reduce them:

Risk: insufficient support from security personnel for runtime monitoring tools
When the puzzling concept of network boundaries began to be seen as whimsical and impractical, runtime application self-protection was created, and security companies were determined to shift the defense layer from the boundary to the host. However, RASP can only deal with small-scale network application vulnerabilities such as CSRF and SQLi, and developers can also solve these relatively small threats effortlessly.

For RASP and WAF, the bigger problem is their lack of vulnerability correction capabilities. Essentially, what they do is to set up temporary barriers, and the latter will become the "backup" for detecting vulnerabilities. If this support and temporary repairs are not recorded and preserved, and are not transmitted to IT managers and executives, then, over time, they may be ignored. Because in everyone's impression, these vulnerabilities have been fixed.

What you can do: Companies need to infiltrate security into the core of the development team, more precisely to make it a key DevOps strategy. You can seek the help of a security situation analyst who will assist you in formulating detailed plans and policies to manage patches, record logs and life cycle documents. This will enable your company to know which solution is best for your line of business, endpoint, platform, scale, and brand awareness.

Risks: short-sighted plans
Both RASP and WAF merely add a layer of protection to the core of the application, and do not help build secure applications. Sooner or later, companies will have to face this difficult and imminent decision: whether to buy a RASP compensation control extension to achieve zero-day vulnerabilities, or to seek fixes from developers. Small and medium-sized companies often struggle to make a choice when weighing obstacles to business continuity and deployment costs.

What you can do: Try to fully anticipate long-term benefits and fully understand the limitations of security implementations, products, and tools. Detailed threat detection not only maintains the company's awareness of vulnerabilities in specific situations, but also focuses on the analysis of defense tactics, and explains threat sources and dangerous behaviors. Therefore, the lack of a risk mitigation plan for such detection is not complete.

Risk: Fully delegated runtime monitoring
The purpose of runtime security design is to prevent real-time attacks, but it is easy to produce false positives. They will treat uncommon traffic as abnormal traffic and block code execution, thereby destroying data availability-eventually causing various DoS attacks. The intelligence of WAF lies in its signature base class and pattern matching resources, but WAF does not know how the application processes user input, it only knows to prevent "seems" to be malicious input. As you might have guessed, hackers can create more clever attacks that pretend to be harmless requests to trick WAF filters.

What you can do: The basic idea is to keep people and technology in sync. Tools are prone to false positives and cannot decide how to act on their own. Security experts need to constantly monitor the tools to explain the nature of complex attacks and distinguish them from regular performance test traffic.

Another important conclusion is that although RASP can make your application self-protective, it also means that it can trick hackers into the storage stack, and there may be other ways to lock hackers outside the network boundary. This situation requires the guidance of a security consultant, who will instill a robust culture and prevent your budget from tilting to a single and obviously imprecise defense mechanism through multi-layer security infrastructure measures.

Security status assessment starts with assisting in the development of secure code, through a mature risk management plan, and backed by customized threat analysis, which will bring you various benefits. Security tools may be able to identify and prevent certain predefined activities, but human penetration testing can break the stereotype and imitate attackers who do their best to avoid standard intrusion prevention signatures.