Application Security Hygiene
In security and cybersecurity, application security hygiene refers to the practices, processes, and measures implemented to ensure software applications' cleanliness, health, and integrity throughout their lifecycle. Just as personal hygiene involves habits and routines to keep the body clean and healthy, application security hygiene involves ongoing efforts to ensure that software applications are developed, deployed, and maintained securely to prevent, detect, and mitigate vulnerabilities and security risks. Application security hygiene encompasses various aspects of secure software development and maintenance, including:
Secure Development Practices: Following secure coding standards, guidelines, and best practices during the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to minimize the introduction of vulnerabilities, such as input validation flaws, buffer overflows, and injection attacks.
Vulnerability Management: To find and fix security flaws in software programs, libraries, and dependencies, as well as do regular penetration tests, vulnerability assessments, and code reviews.
Secure Configuration: Configuring application servers, frameworks, and platforms securely to minimize the attack surface and reduce the risk of exploitation by malicious actors.
Authentication and Authorization: Implementing robust authentication mechanisms, access controls, and authorization policies ensures that only authorized users and entities can access sensitive data and perform privileged actions within the application.
Data Protection: Implementing encryption, data masking, and data anonymization techniques to protect sensitive data at rest, in transit, and during processing, reducing the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access.
Input Validation and Output Encoding: Encoding output to avoid cross-site scripting (XSS) and other injection threats, as well as validating and sanitizing user input to prevent injection attacks, including SQL injection, XSS, and command injection.
Secure Communication: Using secure communication protocols, such as HTTPS/TLS, to encrypt data transmission between clients and servers, protecting against eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks.
Security Testing: Conduct regular security testing, including functional testing, scanning, fuzz testing, and dynamic analysis, to identify and remediate application security vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
Patch Management: ensuring that security patches and upgrades are applied to software programs regularly to fix known vulnerabilities and reduce potential hazards.
Security Awareness and Training: Providing security awareness training and education to developers, testers, and other stakeholders to promote secure coding practices, awareness of common security threats, and adherence to security policies and procedures.
Organizations can improve the resilience of their software applications against cyber threats, lower the risk of security breaches, data leaks, and other security incidents, and shield confidential data and assets from unauthorized access or disclosure by upholding good application security hygiene.
External attack surface management (EASM), digital risk protection (DRP), and security ratings solutions like ThreatNG, equipped with capabilities to assess for Web Application Hijack Susceptibility, Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility, Cyber Risk Exposure, Supply Chain & Third Party Exposure, and Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility, play a crucial role in enhancing application security hygiene by providing comprehensive visibility into an organization's digital footprint, identifying potential threats and vulnerabilities that could compromise the security of software applications. For example, ThreatNG's assessment of Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility can identify vulnerable subdomains that attackers could exploit to hijack web applications, compromising their security. When integrated with complementary security solutions such as web application firewalls (WAFs), vulnerability management platforms, and secure software development tools, ThreatNG can facilitate seamless handoffs by providing actionable intelligence and alerts. Suppose ThreatNG detects a high susceptibility to subdomain takeover attacks. In that case, it can trigger alerts in the WAF to implement additional protections, in the vulnerability management platform to prioritize remediation efforts, or in the secure software development tools to enhance secure coding practices, thereby reducing the risk of application security breaches. This collaborative approach strengthens an organization's ability to proactively manage application security hygiene and protect against emerging cyber threats.
