Web Application Security: Best Practices and Tools

So building security baselines, guidelines, and policies is very important. So, no matter the scale and reputation of the company, no one is 100% safe from all attacks. Many publicly available vulnerability scanning tools can help determine if you’ve made any obvious mistakes. In this article, we’ll consider such tools and steps you can take to secure your site.

Barracuda Cloud Application Protection protects your apps from multiple threats by combining full WAF capability with advanced security services and solutions. Apart from protecting web applications, Barracuda also provides solutions for securing your email, data, and network. StackHawk scans your applications, services, and APIs for security flaws in the code or open-source components. It offers great efficiency in finding and fixing the bugs, allowing your team’s developers to replicate the issue that triggered a vulnerability by copying a cURL command. The international non-profit organization dedicated to web application security OWASP has revealed the top 10 web application layer security risks.

A single breach in a third-party library can cause a major data infringement incident in a company, and without documentation, it will be very hard to find where the problem occurred. Testing should be conducted before release and on an ongoing basis while your application is live. It should be noted that the purpose of web application testing is more than just security, and also covers functionality, usability, and performance.

What Is Web Application Security? Definition, Testing, and Best Practices

Blocking your former employees and changing passwords after a developer leaves the company is another web application security best practice. Think of web application security as a law or compliance mandate, where non-compliance could cost you millions in a data breach or business downtime. The following solutions can help you in several areas of web application security. Some are vulnerability scanners, while others help in web application security testing. Given today’s multi-faceted digital environment, they can significantly reduce the manual efforts needed to protect your online assets from web-based exploitation. Organizations can also implement protective measures within the system itself.

Cultivating a strong password culture encourages you to create passwords that are hard to figure out. Ensure that you have a unique password for every account you have online. Rather than using single words as your passwords, use phrases with a combination of numerals and characters. In the past, if an unauthorized web application security practices user was unable to guess your password, they could hardly gain access. But with a growing number of hacking techniques, figuring out a password isn’t so difficult. The high engagement on web 2.0 means that visitors to your website can enter their personal information for their browsing needs.

The helps you integrate appropriate countermeasures into the design and architecture of the application. To collect the most comprehensive dataset related to identified application vulnerabilities to-date to enable analysis for the Top 10 and other future research as well. This data should come from a variety of sources; security vendors and consultancies, bug bounties, along with company/organizational contributions. Data will be normalized to allow for level comparison between Human assisted Tooling and Tooling assisted Humans. With its contextual threat analysis, Rapid7 streamlines compliance and risk management to provide quick and comprehensive data collection across users, assets, and networks.

Upcoming OWASP Global Events

Basic encryption should include, among other things, using an SSL with a current certificate. It is unacceptable for sensitive user data such as IDs and passwords to be stored in plain text, which could lead to man-in-the-middle attacks. Good habits for personal online security also apply to web application security.

Help prevent cross-site scripting attacks by implementing the x-xss-protection security header. Only highly authorized people should be able to make system changes and the like. Otherwise, you will have to go back down the entire list adjusting settings again. For the vast majority of applications, only system administrators need complete access. Most other users can accomplish what they need with minimally permissive settings. As far as determining which vulnerabilities to focus on, that really depends on the applications you’re using.

So, if you don’t care about security well enough, you may lose money and reputation in the future. Besides, things like that happen often, even in large IT companies. For example, GitHub was attacked by Chinese hackers in 2015, and they brought it down for 10 minutes in total. Peak traffic during this attack was about 1.35 terabytes per second. By its sheer scale, this was one of the most famous DDoS attacks in history. Penetration testing, a function of the ethical hacker, seeks to uncover and address any attack vectors that can be used to breach a web application.

How Does Web Application Security Work?

Penetration testing is one of the most advanced parts of any security testing. It puts your software in near real-world situations where a QA specialist plays the role of a hacker and tries to infiltrate the system by any means, from programming to physical violation. Remote file inclusion, when an attacker remotely injects a file into a web application server. This allows them to execute malicious scripts, steal data, and inflict severe damage. Business websites and online applications are necessary for an abundance of important functions — marketing, sales, branding, and much more.

Error handlers should be configured to handle unexpected errors and gracefully return controlled output to the user. At a bare minimum, we need the time period, total number of applications tested in the dataset, and the list of CWEs and counts of how many applications contained that CWE. The following are some effective security measures that can help protect web applications. LFI is a frequently discovered vulnerability in poorly built web applications. Thus, there are certain limitations for non-seller customers that hackers may exploit. They can find ways to compromise the access control and release unauthorized data as a result of modifying user access permissions and files.

Adopt Real-Time Security Monitoring

In addition, you should implement an account lockout when the system detects the maximum number of password attempts. Using the path input directly in the code can lead to risks such as local file inclusion, remote file inclusion, server-side request forgery and unvalidated redirect and forward. Even if it is required to have paths and URLs in input value, use proper whitelisting to prevent any misuse. It is best to include web application security best practices during the design and coding phases. Otherwise, you’ll have to rely on finding and fixing openings at later stages or after release. Follow these best practices during the various phases of development.

• The current best practice for building secure software is calledSecDevOps.
• While whitelisting is recommended, this validation method is not always possible to implement.
• Sometimes it can be helpful to get fresh eyes on a company’s security practices.
• Web apps deliver the same functionality as desktop or native applications, but with the convenience of browser accessibility.
• Learn about local file injection attacks which allow hackers to run malicious code on remote servers.

With comprehensive in-app encryption, it’ll provide the highest level of security for both managed and unmanaged apps. Moreover, Forcepoint ONE also provides zero-day threat detection while uploading, downloading, and even when data is at rest. Other security features include data leak prevention and malware protection. The absence of a strong cybersecurity framework on your web application can expose it to cyber threats, compromising users’ privacy. Developers working on applications should be trained on the Open Web Application Security Project’sOWASP Top 10 and the SANS Institute’sSANS web application security checklist. This will help them be aware of issues that need to be avoided during coding.

Companies tend to store even sensitive data on the cloud because it’s convenient and low-cost. Therefore, security-related issues become an inevitable concern instead of a luxury option. Implement SSL encryption for all user data you send to and receive from the server. While HTTPS is great and makes man-in-the-middle attacks nearly impossible, it’s not enough if somebody has access to your server.

Top 10 Web Application Security Threats

If the web application accepts the statement, you might be vulnerable to SQL injection – even if it throws up a database error. In a complex digital landscape, it might be impossible to weed out every single vulnerable surface entirely. For instance, the core functionalities underlying the code might contain a flaw – but it is challenging to exploit, does not expose any data, and would lead to no/very little damage. That’s why risks like these need to be documented and publicly shared with users. These eight steps are central to conducting a secure business on the web, which is part of most company’s value proposition right now. Fortunately, there are several tools and technologies that you can use to simplify the process.

Web apps are also vulnerable to cyber threats if developers don’t know versions of used components in the back-end and front-end. Besides, this defect arises when components are unsupported, outdated, misconfigured, or irregularly examined for vulnerabilities. Properly configured web apps control user access to authorized functions. However, when broken access control occurs, hackers can act beyond their allowable limits. Accordingly, they easily approach, modify, leak or destroy all data and files they’re not supposed to access. Today, websites and web apps get more and more complex as cloud computing emerges and develops.

API Security Risks: OWASP Top 10

Validation testing—a critical part of security testing is to validate that remediations were done successfully. You must rerun the test and ensure that the vulnerability no longer exists, or otherwise give feedback to developers. What to report—many security tools provide highly detailed reports relating to their specific testing domain, and these reports are not consumable by non-security experts. Security teams should extract the most relevant insights from automated reports and present them in a meaningful way to stakeholders.

Static application security testing tools such as Snyk Code scan code against predetermined best practices to identify problematic code patterns. With “Identification and Authentication Failures” in the seventh position on the 2021 OWASP Top 10 list, user authentication is an important aspect of web-based security. User authentication management helps strengthen usernames and passwords and gives security admins many options to ensure only approved parties are accessing their apps. One such method is multi-factor authentication, which requires users to prove who they are by using at least two types of authentication.

Work with developers to fix vulnerabilities and retest.

Some businesses believe that the best way to protect against web-related threats is to use aweb application firewall . However, a WAF is just a band-aid tool that eliminates potential attack vectors. The current best practice for building secure software is calledSecDevOps. This approach, which goes further thanDevSecOps, assumes that every person involved in web application development is in some way responsible for security. All the management and executives have security in mind when making key decisions. A container image security scanner will enable you to identify all the application vulnerabilities inside your container images.