Ordering the Right Content

With the recent high-profile website breaches, such as the Experian breach, which affected 123 million people,  companies are becoming aware of the importance of securing their websites and web applications, and the dire consequences of not doing enough to secure them. It's important to stay up-to-date on the latest security threats, your company's web application vulnerabilities, how to address these vulnerabilities and how to build security into your web application development processes rather than as a response to a security breach. Here are some guidelines for ensuring that your website and applications are secure both for your in-house users as well as customers and visitors to your website.

1. Take an audit of your organization's applications. You can't address your company's application security vulnerabilities if you don't know all the applications your company is running, and most company IT managers don't know all the applications (both in-house and consumer-facing) the company runs on a daily basis. Once you complete your inventory, rank them according to priority, with those dealing with financial transactions or sensitive consumer data the most critical.
2. Test for vulnerabilities, starting with the most critical applications. A 2017 report by White Hat Security, found that most enterprise web applications have at least three vulnerabilities. The most common vulnerabilities, according to White Hat, are web app login issues, including lack of a login lockout mechanism for a certain number of failed attempts or descriptive error messages that give too much information to hackers. This is not a once-and-done endeavor. You need to fix the vulnerabilities you find, and continuously monitor your applications and implement proper logging going forward. New threats crop up continually.
3. Fix or mitigate the vulnerabilities, starting with those that would have the most impact on the company and its customers. According to the Web Application Security Statistics Report, fixing critical vulnerabilities takes an average of 148 days. During that time, you'll need alternative security measures in place
4. Implement security best practices, such as

• Use web application firewalls
• Make sure your servers are up to date and running the latest software.
• Run your web applications with the least practical privileges.
• Encrypt all data.
• Use industry-standard authentication processes.
• Cookies are vulnerable to spoofing and other malicious uses so use them securely and consider encrypting them.
• Use techniques like process throttling and error-handling to guard against Denial-of-Service attacks.

Build security into the product design. Security should be a key component of every step of the web application design process. This will require the collaboration of developers, operations, and security teams throughout the development cycle, from conception to delivery and beyond. Code should be checked for security flaws at every stage of development, rather than added on as an afterthought.

Maintaining the integrity of your website and web applications is crucial for your company's reputation and the safety of your customers. It requires keeping abreast of current threats, monitoring and fixing vulnerabilities and working with developers to ensure security is built into the application from the beginning. Make sure your web application developers, whether in-house or third-party, understand the importance of building security into the applications from the outset.

For more help, get in touch with a business like Megastream.