Things You Must Consider for Stronger Web Application Security

Quick Summary: Web apps are important for organizations, but they are also on the hitlist of attackers. So, securing web apps is vital to protect them from cybercriminals. But what can you do about it? The complete web app security checklist in this article helps build a robust security shield to prevent cybersecurity risks. Check out the key factors you must consider to ensure top-notch security for web apps.

Today, web apps are a major target of attackers due to ease of access and a wider attack surface. So, protecting them becomes a priority for organizations. However, as the threat landscape is evolving day by day, you need stronger security measures to defend your web app against these rising threats.

But how can you ensure the best security of your web app? This article will delve into this topic by providing a comprehensive web app security checklist. Web app security isn’t about adding some common features, but it entails many techniques and best practices to improve its security posture.

In addition, regular web app security scanning is essential to assess the current security posture, find weaknesses, and eliminate hidden gaps to mitigate potential security risks. With these measures, you can ensure optimal security for your web application and avoid data breaches or cyberattacks.

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A Quick Overview of Web Application Security

What do you think when you hear web application security? Obviously, it is explicit from its name. The primary objective of web app security is to protect your web-based applications from cybersecurity threats like data breaches, malware, unauthorized access, and more.

In simple words, web app security involves the actions you take to ensure the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of your web application, its resources, and data. There are various tools, best practices, and methods to ensure web app security to protect it from cyber threats.

Why is Web Application Security So Important?

Can you imagine the dangers of your exposed data after a cyberattack on your web app? An attacker can use it to impersonate you and perform financial transactions on your behalf. Plus, the attacker can even misuse the information to commit crimes or fraud. This simple scenario shows how critical web app security is and what could happen if you fail in this aspect. The following are the key points that highlight the importance of web app security.

Avoid Data Breaches

Today, the average cost of a data breach stands at $4.88 billion. It shows how expensive data breaches are. So, you need stronger security measures to protect your web app from evolving threats like Cross-Site Scripting, CSRF, SQL Injection, and more.

Protecting against these threats requires robust web app security. Your defense strategy plays a pivotal role in minimizing potential threats and reducing the chances of cybersecurity incidents that lead to costly data breaches.

Protect Sensitive Data

Every web application handles some sort of sensitive data that needs strong protection against data theft, hacking, ransomware, and other cyber threats. Web app security helps build a strong security shield that prevents these threats and protects your sensitive data.

For example, strong access controls, data encryption, and password hashing are some web app security techniques that help protect sensitive data. They make your data inaccessible to unauthorized users and protect against potential data breaches.

Prevent Reputational Damage

Data loss isn’t the only thing you face with cybersecurity incidents; and it also results in heavy reputational damage. Users of your web application provide their data because they trust it. If there is a data breach incident, this information is exposed to an untrusted party.

It will break users’ trust in your application and spoil your reputation in the market. Besides, your organization will also face legal consequences with heavy fines or penalties.

Compliances

Web apps must comply with some necessary standards and regulations like GDPR, PCI DSS, ISO27001, and more. You need to implement top-notch web application security to achieve the required compliances.

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Web Application Security Checklist

There is a wide range of web app security risks like SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting, CSRF, session hijacking, and more. Weak application security is the primary reason for the occurrence of these cybersecurity risks. However, the following web application security checklist provides robust measures to protect your web app against these threats. By considering these measures, you can ensure that your application is capable of thwarting any malicious attempt.

1. Input Validation

Input is essential for every web application to capture user-supplied information to perform data processing. It ensures that the input received is valid and doesn’t contain malicious information that can allow attackers to execute cyberattacks.

This malicious information includes system commands, SQL queries, special characters, and other types of payloads that attackers can exploit to hijack a web app or access its data. Input validation is necessary for the web app’s security.

Input validation ensures that data entered by users is aligned to the desired standards and format. For example, if a user enters a username with a special character like “@” or “$” while the input validation rule doesn’t allow such characters, the username will be flagged as inappropriate.

2. Encrypt Data

The next essential component of the web app security checklist is data encryption. It simply means encrypting sensitive data into a format that an attacker cannot understand or decrypt. It helps protect a web application’s resources and data from unauthorized access and accidental exposure.

Encrypting data is a critical web app security factor that ensures data confidentiality while preventing unauthorized attempts to access it. You need to consider many things to ensure stronger data encryption, including SSL/TLS implementation, encrypting data at rest, data masking, and key management.

Data encryption is crucial to maintain the integrity and confidentiality of information. It ensures that this data cannot be accessed if unauthorized users try to access it.

3. Ensure Stronger Access Controls

Stronger access controls in web apps ensure data privacy and confidentiality. These access controls prevent unauthorized users from accessing the data. Access controls are also essential for data integrity and preventing unauthorized changes.

Just imagine, an attacker has access to your credentials due to a recent data breach. Now the attacker can access your web app’s resources without any trouble. Plus, the attacker can also gain access to highly privileged users to get absolute control of your application with lateral movement.

However, stronger access controls can prevent this scenario by shielding access to data or resources. It also prevents lateral movement by leveraging techniques like the least access privilege.

4. Strong Authentication and Authorization

Authentication and authorization are two essential techniques to ensure that a web application’s resources and data are accessed by only genuine users. While authentication checks for a user’s identity, authorization verifies the ability of a user to access resources. It prevents attackers from impersonating legitimate users to avoid data leaks.

MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication), account lockout mechanism, password hashing & salting, role-based access control, least privilege, and proper session management are some techniques to ensure robust authentication and authorization.

You will face numerous challenges like data breaches, unauthorized access, and malicious activities without proper authentication and authorization.

5. Continuously Assess Web App

Regular security assessment is pivotal for ensuring top-tier security of your web application. Well, web app security testing is analyzing a web app for potential security risks and vulnerabilities. It involves using a DAST tool to uncover hidden loopholes and prevent cyberattacks.

Security audits for your web application will enable you to gain insight into your security posture. It will uncover critical flaws that can cause a loophole in your web application.

6. Check Error Handling

Another important element of your web application security checklist is error handling. You must ensure that your web application doesn’t expose information that can provide clues about a user’s credentials. For example, if the web app offers a detailed error message like “The password you have entered isn’t correct; please try again,” it can provide clues to an attacker.

Instead of this, the web app should use concise error messages like “Invalid password or username.” In this error message, the attacker won’t have a clear clue about whether the username or password is wrong. So, you must ensure proper error handling to avoid exposing too much information.

7. Use a Web App Firewall

WAF or Web Application Firewall, is a security shield that protects applications against a myriad of dangers. It checks for web traffic and blocks any malicious requests. WAF offers a strong shield for your web application, and it monitors traffic.

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To Wrap Up

As an essential digital asset, securing web apps is crucial for organizations. However, as cyber threats become more complex and widespread, protecting web apps becomes extremely challenging. You need robust security measures to ensure stronger protection against these threats.

However, regular security testing is also important to ensure the current security measures are sufficient to protect your web app from cyber threats. Here, you can take advantage of ZeroThreat to evaluate your web app for a wide range of vulnerabilities and strengthen your security posture.

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