Identifying & Minimizing Security Vulnerabilities For Your Organization
Uploaded on 2021-06-08 in TECHNOLOGY--Resilience, FREE TO VIEW
Although most organizations put in a lot of effort and resources to ensure that they are safe and secure, small flaws in their cyber security architecture can pose a great threat to business assets and operations. Security weaknesses found in servers, computers, networks, applications, and organization procedures can be exploited by malicious parties to gather information and attack an organization.
Some well-known application security vulnerabilities include:
1. Sensitive data exposure
2. Broken authentication
3. Security misconfiguration
4. Cross-site scripting (XSS)
5. Injection flaws
6. Password theft
7. Unvalidated redirects and forwards
8. Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks
9. Insecure direct object references
10. Security misconfiguration
11. Missing function level access control
When organizations are exposed to these vulnerabilities, bad actors can gain access to confidential company and client information. They can also acquire intellectual property, which poses a huge threat to the organization’s growth and credibility.
Therefore, it is important for an organization’s IT team to understand where the gaps in the application security lie and put measures to ensure that the organization does not face any cyber security threat.
How To Identify Cyber Security Vulnerabilities
There are different strategies that organizations can apply to identify cyber security vulnerabilities in their organizations. By conducting a vulnerability assessment, an organization can get a wider visibility of the number of security weaknesses present in their system. They also gain knowledge of where these weaknesses are.
To detect vulnerabilities in application security, your organization can use tools such as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST), Dynamic Application Security Testing(DAST), and Software Composition Analysis (SCA). This is usually done in the design and building stages.
When applications are running in a production environment, Runtime protection tools react in real-time and protect your organization against any attacks.
Minimizing Cyber Security Threats
Today, identifying application security vulnerabilities is not enough. Every organization needs to ensure that they face fewer threats by bridging the gap between detection and remediation. Although perfect security is impossible, organizations must employ trust-based assessment and prioritization of fixing issues that present the biggest security risks.
To minimize cyber security threat, an organization’s IT team needs to address the most urgent application security threats using technologies that are effective and seamlessly integrated into the system. It is also important to update vulnerable versions regularly and preferably automatically.
Organizations continuously improve on their growth and delivery, but this does not mean that they should compromise on security. In order to ensure that your organization is secure, it is important to prioritize cyber security from the design stage and address any security threats when it is fairly simple to curb them. It is also important to remember that bad actors also keep up with evolving technology.
As such, organizations should make sure that their cyber security strategies are up to date in order to prevent attacks. The rise of new architectures offers new attack angles, but adept strategies can keep your organization ahead of any malicious party.
Article Contributed by WhiteSource Software Image: Unsplash
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