In today’s world, preventing security breach is imperative for businesses, as the impact is more than just data or financial loss but also to business reputation. In the Forever 21 security breach case, we could see that a negligence in putting up application security makes organizations high-risk targets for penetration and attacks to their IT systems. Activating encryption to their point-of-sales (POS) application may have prevented malware infiltration that steals customers’ credit card information.
According to WhiteHat Security, nearly 50% of applications remain vulnerable on every single day throughout 2016. The research also found that 60% of web applications in utilities, education, accommodations, retail and manufacturing industries remain “always vulnerable”. This implies that in all but one industry, at least one-third of web applications are always vulnerable and industries are having difficulties to resolve all of the serious vulnerabilities as it takes them a long time to remediate them.
Based on these facts, enterprises should implement enough measures to avoid security breach that comes from insecure applications. According to CIO Custom Solution Group, there are six steps organizations should take.
- Find and assess potential vulnerabilities by deploying an asset management system that creates an up-to-date inventory of every application, such as versions, upgrades, patches, and current configurations.
- Start to educate your IT staff, especially software developers, about specific security gaps and foster the awareness of risk and the need of remediation of applications.
- Create and deploy application security features, because password alone cannot secure applications, applications must include prevention, detection, and correction features.
- Develop continuous methods to find and assess vulnerabilities such as scan and test the security of applications upon each modification to identify problem or any vulnerability.
- Secure applications throughout the development cycle to ensure code coming out of the development department is secure by recommending a set of specific oriented activities to be performed during the development process that are tracked and enforced.
- Make application security an integral part of your operations. This can be done by partnering with a vendor whose solution has deep expertise in both security and development, since most software developers are not security experts, and most security experts do not develop software and developing employees to have both skills will be costly and time consuming.
For businesses that face increasing needs of security and safety for their enterprises, CTI Group as your IT solutions partner, provides you qualified services, technology and expertise to help you align and implement application security to ensure that valuable information does not go to unauthorized parties.
