Most of us are familiar with the phrase ‘less is more,’ but when it comes to cybersecurity, sometimes, more can be more. This isn’t about implementing more tools – the problems caused by cyber sprawl are well-documented. Instead, more is used in the context of collective collaboration and how each tool can complement each other to create a robust cybersecurity strategy.
In this context, three important capabilities have become part of the standard security playbook for organisations the world over. They include code auditing to test code as it’s being developed, pentesting on-demand, and bug bounty programs to uncover vulnerabilities in an organisation’s environments.
It’s not uncommon for organisations to use these tools in isolation, and while each can deliver a range of important benefits, a siloed approach is far less likely to identify a full spectrum of risks and vulnerabilities. Instead, a dovetailed strategy where code auditing, pentesting and bounty programs are fully integrated can provide significantly enhanced levels of protection throughout the software lifecycle. In this scenario, the ethical hacker community can play an essential role, bringing diverse perspectives and techniques to strengthen cybersecurity measures.
Bringing these three disciplines together can also foster strong collaboration between DevOps teams, security engineers and internal red teams, to maximise the efficient use of expensive expert resources. In doing so, organisations can deliver a highly focused strategy revolving around continuous improvement. And this is where the ethical hacker community plays an essential role, bringing diverse perspectives and techniques to strengthen cybersecurity measures.
Looking more closely at each component, code audits are a thorough source code review that aims to identify potential security vulnerabilities. Carried out early in the development process and before deployment, this manual review of code can prevent coding errors from having an impact on post-release security and also minimise the need for future fixes and updates.
Other code audit insights include identifying the use of insecure coding practices, such as input validation and output encoding issues, lack of proper error handling and inadequate access controls, among others. Without correction, these issues can increase the scope for threat actors to use tactics such as injection attacks, cross-site scripting (XSS) and privilege escalation.
This approach can also reveal whether there are hidden backdoors and malicious code, both of which can prove difficult to detect using traditional testing methods. Without this information, organisations and their development teams can find themselves racing to catch up when threat actors uncover code vulnerabilities and use them to mount attacks.
Conducting a code security audit, which costs $11,400 and finds 24 vulnerabilities on average, is significantly more cost-effective than the corresponding bug bounty rewards, which, assuming a normal distribution of vulnerability severities, stands at almost $30,000. Therefore, identifying errors at an earlier stage not only enhances the security of the code but also leads to cost savings for organisations of over $18,000.
A familiar and widely-used security approach to assessing cybersecurity weaknesses, penetration testing employs ethical hackers to test the attack surface of a network or application. It’s a very logical and effective method for revealing where vulnerabilities exist so they can be addressed before threat actors can try the same approach. Pentesting usually begins with a vulnerability scan to identify any potential points of entry, such as problems created by misconfigured firewalls and applications that improperly process malformed packets, among many others.
Once a system has been penetrated, the tester will then attempt to move deeper within the network to gain access to privileged accounts and critical systems. Armed with this kind of insight, pentesters can then supply their clients with detailed insight that can be used to inform both short-term security remediation activities and longer-term strategic planning.
Incorporating ethical hackers into their Penetration-Testing-as-a-Service (PTaaS) strategy gives organisations access to a diverse array of skills and expertise that often surpasses what is available in-house. In fact, pentests uncover an average of 12 vulnerabilities per engagement, with 16% classified as high or critical, demonstrating the effectiveness of community-driven pentesting in detecting critical vulnerabilities before deployment.
Crowdsourced ethical hacking platforms can provide access to hundreds of registered testers at any time, allowing for continuous and adaptable testing that can be scaled according to business needs. These registered hackers are subject to strict vetting processes, which include assessments of their skills, identity verification, and evaluations of their commitment to ethical standards, ensuring they are both trustworthy and competent.
Once an organisation has conducted a thorough code security audit or pentest to identify and address a range of vulnerabilities, it’s crucial to maintain this proactive security approach. A bug bounty program is a comprehensive and offensive strategy to continuously reduce security risk. It incentivises a broad spectrum of ethical hackers to apply their diverse skills and creativity in rooting out even the most novel and elusive vulnerabilities in their shipped products, ensuring robust, multi-layered security.
Bug bounty programs offer financial rewards to ethical hackers for successfully discovering and reporting a vulnerability or bug to the application’s developer. These allow companies to leverage the hacker community to improve their systems’ security posture over time.
In some cases, the rewards can be extremely large. In 2022, for example, a security researcher earned an extremely impressive $10 million for discovering a major vulnerability in a crypto platform. While many other payouts are less impressive, there is a growing trend towards seven-figure sums, and there’s plenty of scope for bug hunting to follow a good career path and generate healthy income.
While these are all powerful and proven security processes, when used in isolation, they can’t offer anything near the impact of an integrated approach delivered via a unified platform. Moreover, the ethical hacker community offers the ideal combination of experience and expertise to give organisations the focused advice they need to address their unique security challenges.
Armed with these collaborative capabilities, organisations can refocus their approach to deliver multi-layered cyber protection that starts with secure code and continues to focus on identifying and remediating vulnerabilities throughout the entire software lifecycle.