Let’s clear the air first. All websites are hackable. So how often are you conducting a security check on your web applications? Sometimes you can be lucky that it’s “checked” by an ethical hacker and they report it, while in less fortunate times, you can be exploited by a black hat hacker, one of the bad guys.
Like most readers, your company is probably trusted with handling sensitive user data, financial information or private content meant to remain private. Investing in web application security resources can help you keep that commitment. Here are 4 ways web application security resources can benefit your teams.
1) Continuous web security against OWASP Top 10 and more
Is your team trained on the OWASP Top 10 web vulnerabilities? If your site is consistently asking users to input information or handling sensitive data then it’s important to keep checking your system’s vulnerability to these.
When code is written without attention to details, it can be easy for a hacker to find OWASP Top 10 security flaws, including using components with known vulnerabilities and XSS. These are often exploited and result in a costly remediation process.
Adding a web app security tool can be set up to automate regular dynamic scans to detect these common vulnerabilities in your code, show you where in the 1000s of code lines they’re found and instruct your developer teams on how to remediate the issue. Developer teams that work with a web application scanner have the possibility to check their code quickly during staging to make one last check for any OWASP Top 10 issues before deployment.
2) Give developers a confidence boost in their own code
Working in agile teams and an agile way to push new updates and products out quickly is a common business methodology. Developers design cutting-edge applications however they are not all experts in web app security or writing secure code. It’s not that they don’t like web app security, okay someone of you must admit it’s not your favourite thing, rather a lot of them feel they don’t have the time or resources to give to web security and check code thoroughly before a release, which causes insecurity and emotional stress.
In fact 87% of respondents in this survey said they’re not confident in their own code. Who would blame them? Developers write 1000s of lines of code, which is tedious to check for flaws and possibly why bugs may never be completely eliminated. But they can be reduced from the get-go when teams build with security in mind and scan before a release. Teams using a website vulnerability scanner check code during staging to see where errors in the web app code exist and fix it before product deployment. As Tanya Janca of Microsoft would say, push left.
Checklists built into scanner tools like Detectify bolster confidence and accountability in developers to write applications that meet OWASP security standards, without heaps of common vulnerabilities. There are many relevant security resources available to check open source code and general OWASP security.
We have built-in an OWASP vulnerabilities checklist to make security easier to work with for developer teams, keeping your applications up to OWASP standard.
3) Get access to a plethora of security knowledge from ethical hackers
Developers out-number security professionals greatly and the top-notch developers, ones that know and care about secure code, are hard to find. Cue in the breakers! Investing in tools that leverage ethical hacker knowledge can fill in security knowledge gaps in your teams. Ethical hackers, aka white hats, hack your applications to find where your security flaws exist and report findings to you rather than exploit it for a large ransom or other personal gains.
You could work with the community in a number of ways such as contracting pentesters, create a bug bounty program or set up a Responsibility Disclosure program to invite white hat hackers to help you find the flaws by breaking your code. Detectify manages the Crowdsource community of 150+ white hat hackers, that work around the clock and the globe to seek out these vulnerable findings and report them in a responsible way. The ethical hacking community understands that the internet is broken, and we need to crowdsource our knowledge to get the information out there and secure it faster. So why not give your security and development teams access to these resources too?
4) Invest because your competitors have already invested
We are seeing high-profile companies and world-class institutions like Spotify, King and KTH leading the way in making safer web applications and building secure-aware teams by using the Detectify web vulnerability scanner to run automated hacker attacks to find the flaws. Tech teams benefit by making web app security matters in the organisation transparent, accessible and user-friendly. Some solutions like Detectify offer API integration into your developer team work environments and a friendly user interface for better adoption. Companies are seeing the benefits of increasing IT cybersecurity budgets rather than the costly handling of PR damage control and remediation.
How to implement web app security now?
It’s not a question of if, but rather when to have web security, and the answer is now. Implementing better web security practices such as an automated vulnerability scanner can improve your application integrity against known vulnerabilities including OWASP Top 10 and allow developers to code with confidence. With a tool like Detectify, you also get the benefit of automated scans for 1000+ known vulnerabilities and access to our exclusive Crowdsource ethical hackers community.
What are you waiting for? Make web app security a best practice for your developer and IT security teams. Sign up for a free 14-day trial of Detectify web vulnerability scanner and begin your first scan right away.