Production-safe DAST: Your secret weapon against threat actors

Software powers modern businesses, but these ever-evolving applications and systems can also include vulnerabilities that threat actors can exploit to disrupt, threaten, and steal critical data. But fear not: Robust security processes can mitigate most of these risks and ensure that new features and updates are properly tested.

By incorporating dynamic application security testing (DAST) into their security processes, businesses can conduct thorough and secure scans of their production environment. This allows them to strike a balance between functionality and security, and makes it possible to deliver new features and functionality to their customers without compromising security. By embracing the challenge of securing applications, organizations can protect their critical data and stay ahead of the curve in a constantly changing market.

Risking a breach

Production environments are where applications are used and accessed. Applications are most vulnerable in production environments because they are exposed to real-world conditions—including the threats they were or were not designed to withstand.

If an organization’s applications are breached, it risks a range of negative consequences that can impact its reputation, finances, and operations, such as

• Data loss or theft
• Disruption of operations
• Regulatory fines and penalties
• Litigation from various entities
• Reputational damage

Because the risks associated with a breach can be severe, it is essential for organizations to take proactive steps to prevent a breach, as well as have a plan in place to respond quickly and effectively if a breach does occur. This is why testing applications in a production environment is important.

It stands to reason that you can’t know how secure your applications are without testing them dynamically in a live environment. On the other hand, testing them live can inadvertently impact your applications and frameworks, putting an organization’s reputation and bottom line at risk. That’s why testing is often done in a staging environment.

The challenge is that staging environments are typically not exact replicas of production environments. Establishing and maintaining a simulated production environment requires significant effort and resources, including configuring a repository and related software, updating them through version control, and creating comprehensive documentation. Although organizations may begin with good intentions, over time, staging and production environments can diverge from one another, becoming increasingly dissimilar.

Consequently, the organization is unable to accurately assess its actual risk posture at any given point in time, since security risks identified and addressed in the test environment may not fully correspond with the risks present in the production environment. Discrepancies between cloud providers, virtualization tools, API gateways, or other components can introduce variations in application vulnerabilities and the way they are exploited.

How DAST can save the day—and the organization itself

DAST solutions can empower an organization to proactively identify vulnerabilities in live applications during runtime and swiftly address them, thwarting potential exploitation by threat actors. DAST leverages "black box" testing, irrespective of whether the code is proprietary or open source, to assess application behavior in response to various tests, such as inserting malicious data to identify security flaws.

While DAST is frequently used in preproduction environments such as testing and staging, it really shines in production environments, where it can map out the organization's exposure to potential attacks. However, DAST could potentially harm or crash a live application if not properly configured or controlled, which makes it a risky proposition for production environments where system stability is critical.

Additionally, it can be tricky to configure a DAST tool to handle certain types of authentication or session-based applications, which may lead to false positives or missed vulnerabilities. And finally, DAST can be resource-intensive, and it can impact application performance and response time during testing, which almost always negatively affects the end-user experience. These risks have primarily been the reason that organizations have struggled with using DAST in a production environment.