As more businesses rely on web and mobile applications for success, application security vulnerabilities have rapidly become the most prevalent cause of data breaches. Thus, it is more important than ever for organizations to protect their applications and code.
Challenges that organizations are currently facing
- The shift to the cloud and cloud-native application technologies is making applications more complex.
- Massively distributed microservices and serverless functions mean that developers are focused solely on their own services, and no one has a complete grasp of the entire codebase.
- As the sheer number of applications increases, the overall lines of software code deployed to the cloud expands the potential attack surface.
- With more organizations focused on digital transformation, knowledge of the legacy code is waning as developers retire or change roles.
- The prevalence of third-party and open source software make applications more composite in nature. As a result, a significant amount of the application code is developed outside the purview of the organization.
- DevOps methodologies help development teams move faster but leave little time for manual or outdated security checks.
The velocity of code change is increasing, the underlying architecture where applications are hosted is changing, and the number of attacks against applications is growing. These three shifts capture the need for lightweight but comprehensive and highly usable application security solutions that serve the needs of both information security and application development teams working in concert. This is achieved by application security tools running efficiently, in the context of projects being worked on, reporting vulnerabilities and an application’s security state accurately. They must also support developer education by providing expert consultation for particularly difficult problems, and a solution that can be easily integrated into SDLCs.
Implementing DAST is not only necessary to determine the security posture of applications running in production and how they will likely interact with end users—it has now become essential for teams to keep up with the changing nature of applications and the knowledge of adversaries. Effective DevSecOps starts with taking feedback produced from DAST and integrating it into SecOps and DevOps tools. After all, DAST finds the actual vulnerabilities that put an organization and its end users at risk
- Protect your applications and your code
- Identify inherited and new vulnerabilities
- Provide quality vulnerability assessment reports to expedite the remediation process
As organizations become increasingly dependent upon cloud platforms, they need to consider all aspects of security and not overlook the application security layer. With the continuing growth of new applications, APIs, and functionality, the application attack surface is rapidly expanding. This growth incents bad actors to use readily accessible tools and utilities to exploit applications with known vulnerabilities or susceptible code. Once an application is compromised, these bad actors can gain undetected access to confidential customer data, personally identifiable information, and/or other exploitable corporate assets, subjecting an organization to costly breaches of information and betrayal of customer trust.
Testing applications solely in development cannot protect them from being breached in production. A formal application security program is essential to reduce overall business risk. The right strategy and technology can identify the exploits that can be used in an attack on applications, and show how to protect application before a breach happens. When this is done correctly, organizations empower their teams to take responsibility and correct potential issues quickly, without disruption.
