Trend Micro introduces the application security risks and safeguards. Developers who work in traditional development teams tend to think about security after the fact because they focus too much on building applications and meeting deadlines.
Applications play an integral role today and many businesses and users rely on a wide range of applications for work, education, entertainment, retail, and other purposes. Therefore, development teams play a key role in ensuring that applications provide users with a high level of usability and performance, as well as security from threat actors who are always on the lookout for weaknesses, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and other security holes that they can use to conduct malicious activities. The security risks have become even more pronounced as companies need to get applications to market quickly to keep their business and revenue generating processes going.
The serious risks posed by insecure applications illustrate the need for application security in the design, development, and deployment phases. It is therefore necessary to discuss the security risks and threats to which applications could be exposed and the possibilities for organizations to incorporate appropriate cybersecurity protections into their DevOps pipeline.
Application security risks
The increasing complexity of applications and their dependence on third-party libraries make them vulnerable to security threats, among other things. A Forrester report from 2020 found that the majority of external attacks were carried out by exploiting a software vulnerability or a web application. The report cites open source software as a major problem for application security and points to the 50% increase in open source vulnerabilities since last year.
The proliferation of containers and the required APIs also bring additional risks. A 2020 Snyk report finds that nine out of ten of the top 10 official container images contain more than 50 vulnerabilities. An F5 report from 2019 found that API breaks are caused either by large platforms that contain many third-party integrations, or by mobile applications and as a result of misconfigurations of the applications.
Application security risks from unsafe code
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Foundation provides a comprehensive list of risks for web applications and APIs. It is important that developers understand the most common application security risks - usually caused by unsafe code - so that they can review the areas they need to cover at each stage of the development pipeline. Trend Micro lists the most common application risks on its blog.
More on this in the blog at Trendmicro.com
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