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Application Security

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1.As enterprises move more of their data, code, and operations into the cloud, attacks against those assets can increase. How can application security measures reduce the impact of such attacks?

The growing adoption of cloud environments has made web applications equally vulnerable as networks. For example, the Radware’s The State of Web Application and API Protection report shows that 70% of production web applications now run in cloud environments. Thus, holding these modern infrastructures with traditional security practices is like using glues and strings.

Besides, the threat landscape is ever-evolving, with ransomware, data leaks/theft, or DDoS attacks breaking the news headline every day.

Therefore, companies must take a holistic approach towards securing their sensitive data like company, employee, and client information as loss of these pieces of information can not just break the bank but also cripple the long-built reputation. Solutions like next-gen web application firewalls come to the rescue in these situations.

Next-gen WAF is a security solution that offers enhanced capabilities and features than a traditional firewall like intrusion prevention and deep packet inspection.

Moreover, it not only stops and prevents known vulnerabilities like DDoS but also unknown ones like zero-day attacks where the hacker exploits vulnerability even before the developers have had a chance to patch or discover them.

Thus, solutions like next-gen WAF help you keep your web applications secure by preventing attacks and breaches like SQL injection, PHP injection, XXS command executions, and more.

2.Kindly tell us about the various aspects of the emerging technologies regarding application security.

With the rapid development of web applications and migration to the cloud, security can quickly take a hit if proactive measures are not adopted in time. Malicious attacks, tampering, and other security incidents cripple a company’s intellectual property, customer information, and other sensitive business data, causing catastrophic and often irreparable damages to the business.

So, to reduce the friction between performance and security, the best approach is to adopt solutions like a web application firewall that works specifically on the application layer of the OSI model and shields your business against the most widespread attacks.

WAF also provides an active incident response to stop hackers in their tracks and post-incident analysis and diagnosis to provide guidance for strengthening servers against future attacks.

Another aspect is the growing concern of malicious bots or bad bots used to conduct attacks like DDoS. DDoS overwhelms the server’s capacity and blocks any legitimate traffic from accessing the resource. What’s more concerning is that even hackers with limited hacking knowledge can jeopardize a company’s sensitive information with the help of bots-as-a-service. This allows hackers to automate attacks and conduct them on a large scale without technical knowledge.

Bad bots can cause threats and attacks like user data theft, account takeover, and more. Thus companies can no longer overlook the threat posed by bad bots and take preventive measures and deploy DDoS prevention solutions.

Finally, IT professionals must keep themselves abreast with emerging technologies, extended detection and response (XDR), security information and event management (SIEM), and security orchestration and response (SOAR). XDR is a successor to EDR (endpoint detection and response) and collects data from various detection points like networks, servers, cloud, endpoints, and more. XDR is an ideal replacement for siloed security structures and provides a unified approach to security. It helps you view a pool of information and data under a single roof and allows for advanced and more efficient threat detection and prevention.

SIEM and SOAR are used for high-level, complex tasks utilized by highly specialized IT professionals. It helps to analyze, aggregate, and store large logs of data. Solutions like these brighten the future of the security landscape, giving IT professionals an upper hand over hackers.

3.What are the anticipated challenges and practices of deploying application security?

Security features can often become a performance roadblock. One such instance is HTTPS applications. While the additional SSL layer encrypts data and makes it extremely safe from hackers, it also can slow down performance, especially during peak times. This is because encryption-decryption is a processor-driven task and can consume the server’s resources.

To remediate that, SSL offloading is an ideal solution. This solution detaches the encryption-decryption task from the load balancer/WAF to a separate hardware device and relieves the server of the burden. This allows the website to perform optimally despite the high traffic.

Another key challenge with IT teams is that with growing technologies and heterogeneous environments, it’s getting more difficult than ever to maintain visibility and control. To ensure security in today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving world, companies must adopt a holistic approach toward security and start thinking about their security infrastructures differently. Furthermore, IT teams should keep a close check to reduce false positives (an instance that shows a threat where there’s none). Finally, your AppSec program should provide a comprehensive view of the attack logs and other attributes to understand the behavior of the attack and fine-tune future security policies.

4.Enlighten us about the trends and future of application security.

The application landscape is evolving at lightning-fast speed. Trends like CI/CD, accelerated time to market, and the concept of DevOps teams enable developers to roll out new applications and features at a greater speed than ever before and increase the performance of the website.

Thus, to keep your network, server, code and assets secure from the malicious target of hackers, your AppSec program must address the next-gen attack vectors and API-based attacks and provides zero-day protection for a healthy security posture.

Another trend on the rise is OT (operational technology) security in the industrial industries. OT systems were traditionally not exposed to the internet and internet-based threats, and there wasn’t any need for OT security. But, the rise of digital transformation initiatives poses a threat to the OT systems. Thus, OT security is rapidly evolving to protect industrial systems, networks, and industrial control systems (ICS) from attacks. In addition, OT security ensures the optimal functioning of all systems to protect people and systems against attacks like malware infiltration and more.