Cybersecurity has never been as necessary as in today’s modern business landscape. While digital innovation has made running a business more seamless, it has also opened businesses to more evasive cyber threats, especially in software applications.
One way to protect your apps and digital assets is by implementing proactive security measures like application security and vulnerability risk assessment to preempt, protect, and defend businesses against cyberattacks.
At the end of this article, you’ll understand these measures and why your business needs them.
Understanding Application Security
According to Veracode, over 75% of software applications have at least one security vulnerability.
You can infer two things from this statistic. One, apps are a soft target for hackers looking for an entry point into a business’s network. Two, every business needs application security.
So, what is application security, and how can it help protect your data?
Application security is a general term for all security measures used to protect software applications from cyberattacks. It refers to a constant security optimization process that runs through all the stages of app development, from design to deployment, including app maintenance.
Common threats to software applications include SQL injections, cross-site scripting (XSS), denial of service, malware attacks, etc.
Most of these attacks are caused when a vulnerability in the software application is exploited.
Identifying Vulnerabilities and Assessing Risk
An app vulnerability is a weakness in the app that allows hackers to compromise its security and data through malicious attacks. These vulnerabilities usually stem from issues during the development cycle—like poor configuration, weak design, or coding mistakes. Whether your application is hosted on-prem or in the cloud, these flaws create loopholes in app security that cyber attackers can exploit.
To prevent this negative spiral, businesses adopt vulnerability assessment processes to scan their applications’ attack surface—including APIs, infrastructure, and cloud—for weak spots. This process typically includes two approaches: penetration testing and vulnerability scanning.
Penetration testing simulates real-world cyber attacks to expose vulnerabilities. Think of it as ethically hacking your own app so you can fix the holes before bad actors find them.
Vulnerability scanning, on the other hand, uses automated tools to search for known security issues in your application—whether it’s running locally or in a cloud environment. Modern scanners often include cloud security assessments to catch misconfigurations in cloud-based services and infrastructure.
Next up is risk assessment, which evaluates which of the discovered vulnerabilities poses the biggest threat. This can be built into your vulnerability scanner or run separately as part of your security workflow.
To determine risk levels, threat assessment tools use the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) to categorize the severity of vulnerabilities on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most severe. The CVSS framework compares vulnerabilities using scores from three metric groups: base, temporal, and environmental. These groups measure different vulnerability metrics, such as exploitability and impact metrics, to evaluate total vulnerability risk. Depending on the CVSS score, vulnerabilities are handled according to their severity.
With this security rating, SOC teams can prioritize critical vulnerabilities and patch them before attending to low-risk vulnerabilities.
Note that vulnerability assessment is not a one-time effort. It needs to be done regularly, because new application weaknesses emerge with prolonged app usage and upgrades.
The Power of Proactive Protection
In cybersecurity, prevention is the best medicine, and proactive security is prevention. Every business must adopt proactive security measures to minimize its attack surface.
Aside from application security and threat assessment, some other proactive security measures include multi-factor authentication, zero-trust architecture, and employee training.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA), for instance, adds an additional layer of security to verify user identity before granting access. It reduces the risk of unauthorized access and alerts all parties to any hacking attempts.
Zero-trust architecture operates on the assumption that no user or device can be trusted by default. As a result, all users must be verified each time they request access. It also grants users only the minimum access required to carry out their activity.
Here are some advantages of proactive protection over the reactive approach (security measures that are implemented after a cyber attack occurs):
- When you’re proactive, you patch vulnerabilities, run regular scans, and monitor traffic, so you catch threats before they turn into full-blown breaches.
- Fixing a breach after it happens is expensive. But when you prevent it in the first place, you avoid legal fees, downtime, and damage to your brand’s trust.
- With proactive measures in place, meeting data privacy laws and industry standards becomes less of a scramble, and more of a routine.
- When you lead with prevention, your team starts thinking “security-first”. People get more careful, stay alert, and report issues early.
A Tale of Two Networks
Let’s compare two companies, one runs a reactive security model while the other runs a proactive security model, and see how they react to the same cyber attack.
Scenario 1
Company one uses outdated software, employees have weak passwords, and there is no endpoint protection.
An employee in this company receives a phishing email disguised as a coupon advertisement in their inbox. They have no idea that this is a phishing attack and click on the link. Without their knowledge, they download an embedded ransomware that infects the entire network, wiping data and causing them significant financial loss.
Scenario 2
Company two focuses on both proactive and reactive security. They regularly update their software, have strong application security, and train their staff on detecting phishing attacks.
Assuming a phishing email is sent to an employee in network two. Their proactive anti-phishing security tool filters the email out of the employee’s inbox. And since the email never makes it to the employee, the attack is futile and business continues as usual.
Lessons Learned
In the tale of the two networks above, there’s a clear distinction between how similar phishing attacks were handled.
In scenario one, the first company had to pause business activity and deal with a cyber attack while losing money, time, and its reputation. In the second scenario, the phishing mail doesn’t even get to its target and is filtered out.
Even if the phishing email had reached an employee’s inbox in scenario two, the attack still would’ve failed, because Company Two had already trained their team to spot and ignore it. Company two had implemented a multi-layered proactive security strategy that leaves no room for a surprise attack. In every scenario, Company Two will always be prepared and equipped to protect against a potential cyber attack.
From this illustration, it’s clear that having a proactive security model makes a tangible difference.
Therefore, businesses need to learn from company two; conduct regular audits and update their systems to improve their protection against cyber attacks, and use proactive security tools and processes.
Proactive + Reactive Security
Dealing with the fallout of a cyber attack costs time and resources. So here’s your reminder to assess the security of your networks and applications today. Run vulnerability scans and risk assessments to identify and fix your network’s weaknesses. Most importantly, implement both proactive and reactive security measures to protect your defenses from cyber attacks.
