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Beyond the Security Bottleneck: Why AppSec-as-a-Service is Your Development Team's Secret Weapon

Tue, 20 May 2025 20:37:50 GMT

In today's high-velocity development environment, security teams are facing an impossible equation: protect an ever-expanding application landscape with increasingly limited resources while not slowing down innovation. This tension has created what many organizations experience as the "security bottleneck" – where application security becomes the constraint that prevents rapid, continuous delivery of new or updated applications.

But what if application security could transform from your biggest bottleneck into your development team's secret weapon?

The Hidden Cost of the Security Talent Shortage

The cybersecurity talent gap has reached crisis levels, with over 3.4 million unfilled positions globally. This shortage hits application security particularly hard, as this specialized discipline requires deep understanding of both security principles and modern development practices.

The consequences of this resource constraint are severe:

Security debt: With insufficient resources to address vulnerabilities promptly, organizations accumulate "security debt" that becomes increasingly expensive to resolve.
Delayed releases: Without adequate application security staff, critical reviews and assessments create bottlenecks.
Vulnerability backlogs: Security teams prioritize only the most critical issues, leaving other vulnerabilities unaddressed. Large amount of false positives resulting from scanners overwhelm the teams even more in clearing the backlogs.
Developer frustration: When security guidance is delayed or vague, developers waste time or implement incomplete fixes.

Why Early Detection Changes Everything

The financial implications of application security are straightforward but often overlooked: vulnerabilities found early in the SDLC cost dramatically less to fix than those discovered in production. According to industry research, fixing a vulnerability discovered during design or coding phases costs about $80, while the same vulnerability found in production costs approximately $2,500 – a 30x increase.

This cost multiplier goes beyond just the financial impact:

Architectural implications: Early-stage vulnerability detection can prevent fundamental design flaws that may be nearly impossible to fix later.
Development momentum: Late-stage security issues can disrupt entire release schedules and dev team focus.
Business impact: Production vulnerabilities can affect customer trust, compliance status, and market position.

The challenge, of course, is having the right application security expertise available at the right development stages to identify these issues early.

The False Positive Problem No One Talks About

While many organizations have invested in automated security tools to compensate for limited security personnel, these tools create a new problem: false positives. A recent study found that up to 70% of security alerts generated by automated tools turn out to be false positives or low-risk issues that don't warrant remediation.

This creates several cascading problems:

Alert fatigue: Developers and security professionals become desensitized to warnings.
Wasted engineering time: Valuable development resources are spent investigating non-issues.
Missed critical vulnerabilities: Real threats get lost in the noise.
Deteriorating security culture: When tools cry wolf repeatedly, security loses credibility.

What's needed isn't just more scanning – it's expert human judgment to contextualize, validate, and prioritize findings in ways that automated tools simply cannot.

AppSec-as-a-Service: The Force Multiplier

This is where Application Security as a Managed Service (or AppSec-as-a-Service) enters as a strategic solution. Rather than struggling to build a complete in-house application security team – an increasingly difficult proposition given the talent shortage – organizations can extend their capabilities through specialized partners.

The most effective AppSec-as-a-Service solutions act as force multipliers by providing:

1. Contextual Vulnerability Validation

Expert security professionals validate and contextualize automated findings, eliminating false positives and providing meaningful risk assessments based on your specific business context.

2. Practical Remediation Guidance

Rather than vague vulnerability reports, developers receive specific guidance – sometimes even including code examples – on how to fix issues effectively.

3. SDLC Integration Expertise

Security experts help integrate security checkpoints throughout your development lifecycle with your systems, ensuring vulnerabilities are caught at the optimal time without creating bottlenecks.

4. Security Debt Management

Managed services can help prioritize existing vulnerability backlogs, creating realistic remediation roadmaps that align with business priorities.

5. Knowledge Transfer

Beyond just finding and fixing vulnerabilities, effective AppSec partners help upskill development teams, gradually reducing dependency on external resources.

The Business Case for AppSec-as-a-Service

The ROI calculation for AppSec-as-a-Service becomes compelling when considering:

Cost avoidance: Preventing just one significant breach (average cost: $4.88 million) easily justifies the investment.
Accelerated development: Removing security bottlenecks and false positives can improve development velocity by 20-30%.
Resource optimization: Internal security resources can focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine vulnerability management.
Compliance efficiency: Expert partners can streamline security compliance activities.
Scalable security: AppSec resources can flex with development needs without the overhead of hiring.

In today's threat landscape, where every organization faces both talent shortages and escalating cyber risks, AppSec-as-a-Service isn't merely a cost-effective solution—it's a strategic investment that transforms security from your greatest vulnerability into your strongest competitive advantage.

The Strategic Remediation Approach

One of the most valuable aspects of a managed application security approach is transitioning from "fix everything" to focused remediation. When working with limited resources, prioritization becomes critical.

Effective remediation strategies include:

Business impact analysis: Prioritizing vulnerabilities affecting critical business functions or sensitive data.
Exploitation difficulty assessment: Evaluating how easily vulnerabilities could be exploited in your specific environment.
Root cause analysis: Identifying underlying patterns that can be addressed systematically rather than symptomatically.
Remediation efficiency: Grouping similar vulnerabilities that can be fixed through common solutions.
Development synchronization: Aligning fixes with planned development activities to reduce context switching.

Application Security Maturity: A Journey, Not a Destination

Perhaps the most important realization when implementing AppSec-as-a-Service is understanding that application security maturity is an ongoing journey. The most successful organizations don't attempt to leap to perfect security overnight – they build capabilities progressively.

A maturity-focused managed security approach typically follows this progression:

Assessment and visibility: Establishing a baseline understanding of the current application security posture.
Critical vulnerability remediation: Addressing the most serious and exploitable issues.
Process integration: Embedding security checkpoints into existing development workflows.
Developer enablement: Providing training and tools to help developers write secure code from the start.
Continuous improvement: Implementing metrics and feedback loops to drive ongoing security enhancements.

Choosing the Right AppSec Partner

Not all application security service providers are created equal. When evaluating potential partners, consider these critical factors:

Technical depth: Look for deep expertise in both security and modern development methodologies.
Communication style: Prioritize partners who communicate in developer-friendly language rather than security jargon.
Business understanding: The best partners recognize security must align with business objectives.
Unparalleled Support: Your needs will evolve; ensure your partner can adapt their services accordingly.
Culture alignment: Security partners should enhance your development culture, not conflict with it.

Beyond Security: Competitive Advantage

When implemented effectively, application security as a managed service doesn't just protect your organization – it becomes a competitive advantage. In an era where security breaches make headlines weekly, the ability to develop and deploy secure applications quickly creates business differentiation.

Organizations with mature application security practices:

Release faster: With security integrated throughout the SDLC, there are fewer last-minute surprises.
Innovate more confidently: Teams can explore new technologies with appropriate security guardrails.
Build customer trust: Security becomes a selling point rather than a liability.
Attract talent: Developers increasingly want to work where security is valued and well-implemented.

About Cypress Data Defense's EASy Managed Service

Cypress Data Defense's Enhanced Application Security (EASy) managed service was designed specifically to address the challenges outlined in this article. As a comprehensive AppSec-as-a-Service solution, EASy helps resource-constrained organizations transform application security from a bottleneck into a business enabler.

The EASy managed service provides:

Expert Vulnerability Assessment and Validation

Our security professionals don't just run automated scans – they analyze your applications in context, eliminating false positives and providing accurate risk assessments that matter to your business.

Practical, Developer-Friendly Remediation Guidance

Instead of vague security reports, your team receives specific guidance with clear examples of how to fix identified vulnerabilities, reducing the back-and-forth that typically slows security remediation.

Seamless SDLC Integration

We work with your development teams to integrate security throughout your development lifecycle, catching vulnerabilities when they're least expensive to fix without disrupting your development velocity.

Flexible Engagement Models

Whether you need comprehensive application security coverage or targeted assistance with specific high-risk applications, our service scales to match your needs and budget constraints.

Security Maturity Development

Beyond immediate vulnerability remediation, we help you build lasting security capabilities through developer training, process improvement, and security culture development.

With Cypress Data Defense's EASy service, you gain the expertise of a dedicated application security team without the overhead and challenges of building one from scratch in today's competitive talent market.

Conclusion: Security as an Enabler

The old view of application security as a necessary evil that slows development is outdated and counterproductive. With the right managed security approach, application security becomes an enabler of faster, more reliable development.

By addressing the critical challenges of resource constraints, false positives, and late-stage vulnerability detection, AppSec-as-a-Service transforms security from a bottleneck into a strategic advantage. In today's threat landscape, this transformation isn't just nice to have – it's essential for survival and success.

As you evaluate your application security approach, ask yourself: Is security your development team's biggest constraint, or is it their secret weapon? If it's not the latter, it's time to consider Cypress Data Defense's EASy service as your path forward.

Contact us today to get a free assessment on a sample application so you can see the power of this service: https://cypressdefense.com/contact/

Finding Application Vulnerabilities Early: Why It Matters and How to Succeed with Limited Resources

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 08:16:10 GMT

Application security vulnerabilities discovered late in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) can lead to costly delays, emergency patches, and potentially devastating data breaches. As cyber threats continue to evolve, organizations face mounting pressure to secure their applications—often with limited security resources. This reality creates a perfect storm where application security teams are overwhelmed, vulnerabilities slip through, and businesses become increasingly susceptible to attacks.

The High Cost of Late-Stage Vulnerability Detection

When security flaws are discovered late in development or after deployment, the consequences extend far beyond technical issues:

Increased remediation costs: IBM estimates that vulnerabilities discovered during production cost up to 30 times more to fix than those found during the design phase.
Project delays: Late-stage security fixes can force development teams to miss deadlines and delay releases.
Compliance risks: Applications with unresolved vulnerabilities may fail to meet regulatory requirements, leading to potential fines.
Cost of breach: A breach can cost over $4.5M including costs of ransom, forensics, remediation, and disruption of business.
Reputational damage: Security breaches resulting from exploited vulnerabilities can severely impact customer trust and brand value.

The Resource Gap in Application Security

Despite the clear importance of application security, many organizations face significant resource constraints:

Security teams are chronically understaffed, with the cybersecurity workforce gap exceeding 3.4 million unfilled positions globally
Security professionals are overwhelmed with alerts and vulnerability reports, many of which turn out to be false positives
Development teams often lack specialized security expertise, making vulnerability remediation challenging
The rapid pace of development cycles (especially in DevOps environments) makes thorough security testing difficult to maintain

These constraints leave applications vulnerable to attacks. According to recent studies, 76% of applications have at least one security flaw, and 24% have high-severity vulnerabilities that could lead to significant breaches.

Shifting Security Left: Early SDLC Vulnerability Detection

Integrating security earlier in the SDLC—often called "shifting left"—offers substantial benefits:

Cost efficiency: Early detection dramatically reduces remediation costs
Faster development: Addressing security during development prevents costly delays
Improved security posture: Systematic early testing catches more vulnerabilities before they reach production
Security culture: Early integration builds security awareness among developers

However, implementing this approach effectively requires both technical expertise and adequate resources—precisely what many organizations lack.

How Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) Fill the Gap

This is where partnering with a strong MSSP becomes valuable. A qualified MSSP brings specialized expertise to:

Reduce false positives**: Advanced MSSPs use contextual analysis and

expert validation to eliminate false positives, allowing your team to focus on legitimate threats rather than chasing ghosts.

Provide actionable remediation guidance**: Rather than simply flagging

vulnerabilities, good MSSPs offer specific guidance on how to fix issues, often including code examples or configuration recommendations.

Integrate throughout the SDLC**: Effective MSSPs work with your team

to implement security checks at multiple stages—from design reviews and threat modeling to code scanning, penetration testing, and runtime protection.

Standardize security processes**: MSSPs help establish consistent

security practices across multiple development teams and projects.

Offer specialized expertise**: MSSPs maintain teams of security

professionals with expertise in various frameworks, languages, and attack vectors.

Cypress Data Defense's EASy Service: Optimal for Resource-Constrained Teams

For organizations with limited application security resources, Cypress Data Defense's Enhanced Application Security (EASy) service offers a tailored solution that addresses these challenges effectively.

The EASy service provides:

Continuous vulnerability assessment: Scanning across the entire application portfolio to identify vulnerabilities before they can be exploited
False positive elimination: Expert validation ensures your team only

focuses on real threats

Practical remediation guidance: Specific, actionable recommendations

for fixing vulnerabilities quickly

Integration with existing workflows: Seamless connection with

development tools and processes

Flexible engagement models: Right-sized security support based on

your organization's specific needs

By augmenting internal security teams with specialized expertise, the EASy service helps resource-constrained organizations achieve enterprise-grade application security without needing to build and maintain a large in-house security team.

In today's threat landscape, application security can't be an afterthought. By focusing on early vulnerability detection and leveraging expert MSSP support like Cypress Data Defense's EASy service, organizations can effectively secure their applications despite resource limitations—turning application security from a bottleneck into a business enabler.

Contact us today to get a free assessment on a sample application so you can see the power of this service: https://cypressdefense.com/contact/

How Managed Security Services Can Enhance Application Security Early in the SDLC

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 19:42:10 GMT

Why Securing Applications in the SDLC Matters More Than Ever

Application security is no longer an afterthought. In today’s fast-paced development cycles, vulnerabilities are often introduced early in the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), where they remain undetected until later stages—or worse, until after deployment. According to OWASP, 80% of vulnerabilities originate in the development phase, making it crucial to integrate security as early as possible. The challenge? Traditional security testing approaches are often reactive, expensive, and disruptive to agile workflows.

That’s where Managed Security Services Providers (MSSPs) step in, helping organizations implement proactive security strategies that embed security early, minimize risk, and maintain development velocity. Let’s explore how MSSPs can transform the way businesses approach application security.

Challenges of Securing Applications Without MSSPs

Many organizations struggle to secure applications early in the SDLC due to several key challenges:

Limited In-House Expertise – Security is a specialized skill set, and many development teams lack deep security expertise to identify vulnerabilities effectively during coding.

False Positives & Alert Fatigue – Traditional security scans generate excessive alerts, overwhelming teams with false positives and non-critical issues.

Time & Resource Constraints – Development teams are under immense pressure to ship features quickly, making it difficult to prioritize security testing without causing bottlenecks. Even if there is an InfoSec team in place, there are too many other priorities to protect the infrastructure and not enough time.

Compliance Burdens – Regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS demand rigorous security controls that many organizations struggle to implement effectively.

Without a dedicated security partner, vulnerabilities often go undetected until later stages, where remediation costs 30x more than fixing them during development. How an MSSP Enhances Application Security Early in the SDLC An experienced MSSP with a focus on application security provides continuous, expert- driven security services that integrate seamlessly into the development pipeline. Here’s how they help organizations strengthen security early in the SDLC:

1. Proactive Threat Detection & Risk Prioritization

MSSPs leverage advanced automated security scanning, static application security testing (SAST), and dynamic analysis to identify vulnerabilities before applications go into production. This ensures:

Critical security flaws are detected before deployment.
False positives are reduced through expert validation.
Developers receive actionable, prioritized recommendations.

2. Seamless Integration with DevSecOps & CI/CD Pipelines

Modern MSSPs offer security solutions that integrate directly into Jenkins, GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, and other CI/CD tools. This allows organizations to:

Automate security testing within development workflows.
Avoid security bottlenecks that slow down releases.
Enable developers to fix security issues as they code.

3. Expert-Led Security Guidance & Developer Enablement

In addition to using automated tools, experienced MSSPs can provide real-world security expertise through:

Secure coding best practices & training.
On-demand security consultation & vulnerability triage.
Threat modeling to identify potential attack vectors early.

By embedding security education into development processes, MSSPs empower teams to write secure code by default, reducing long-term risks.

4. Compliance & Regulatory Support

For industries requiring strict compliance, MSSPs can offer tailored security solutions that align with regulatory frameworks, providing:

Compliance-ready reports for PCI-DSS, GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA, etc.
Continuous monitoring to ensure regulatory adherence.
Streamlined security audit preparation.

This reduces the burden on internal teams while ensuring applications meet security and compliance standards from day one.

Why Cypress Data Defense Stands Out

Not all MSSPs are created equal. At Cypress Data Defense, we take a highly efficient, low-friction approach to securing applications early in the SDLC. Our EASy managed service provides:

Minimal False Positives – Our expert-driven approach ensures security alerts are

accurate and actionable, eliminating unnecessary noise.

Seamless CI/CD Integration – Security that works in real-time, integrating with

your existing DevOps pipelines without slowing you down.

Proactive & Continuous Security – Identifying vulnerabilities before they become

critical risks, not after deployment.

Expert-Led Security Guidance – Hands-on security expertise to help developers

and security teams triage and remediate issues faster.

The result? A highly efficient security process that doesn’t disrupt your development speed—while keeping your applications secure.

Final Thoughts

Securing applications early in the SDLC is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. The earlier vulnerabilities are caught, the cheaper and easier they are to fix. Managed Security Services Providers (MSSPs) offer a cost-effective, expert-driven approach that allows businesses to stay ahead of threats, integrate security seamlessly, and maintain compliance effortlessly.

If you’re looking for an MSSP that understands agile development and provides efficient, developer-friendly security, Cypress Data Defense is here to help.

You can also check out our On-Demand Webinar hosted by CyberEdge, that goes into details on how we can help.

Schedule a Free Security Consultation Today

Static Application Security Testing (SAST): The Good, The Bad, and The Realistic

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 13:23:10 GMT

Automated security scanners are like overeager security guards - they mean well, but they're not always the most nuanced problem solvers. While these tools have become a staple in modern software development, they're far from perfect.

Let's break down the real challenges that make automated security scanning more complicated than most developers realize.

The False Positive Nightmare

Imagine receiving hundreds of security alerts, only to discover that 80% are completely irrelevant. That's the false positive problem. These scanners frequently flag issues that aren't actual security vulnerabilities, creating a massive distraction for development teams.

The result? Developers start treating these alerts like background noise. Critical warnings get buried under mountains of meaningless notifications, potentially allowing genuine security risks to slip through unnoticed.

Context? What Context?

Automated scanners operate like robots with checklists. They can't understand the intricate context of your specific application architecture. A vulnerability in one system might be a non-issue in another, but these tools can't distinguish those nuanced differences.

They scan with broad, inflexible parameters, missing the subtle interactions and unique design considerations that human security experts would immediately recognize. It's like having a color-blind person sorting your wardrobe - they'll miss critical color coordination.

Runtime Blindspots

Here's a critical limitation: most automated scanners are static. They analyze code and configurations but struggle to detect runtime vulnerabilities. Dynamic security issues that only emerge during actual application execution? Those often sail right past these tools.

Imagine a security vulnerability that only appears when specific user interactions occur. An automated scanner might give your application a clean bill of health, while a real-world attacker could easily exploit that hidden weakness.

The Configuration Conundrum

Configuring these scanning tools is like solving a complex puzzle. Each scanner comes with its own set of rules, configurations, and parameters. Developers must become part-time security experts, constantly tweaking and adjusting settings to make the scanner somewhat useful.

This complexity leads to two primary outcomes: either developers spend excessive time managing the tool or they implement generic, ineffective configurations that provide a false sense of security.

The Time Sink Problem

Reviewing and addressing scanner-identified issues isn't a quick task. What should be a streamlined process often turns into hours of manual investigation. Each alert requires careful examination, context understanding, and potential remediation.

For smaller teams or organizations with limited resources, this becomes an unsustainable model. The security scanning process itself becomes a significant productivity drain.

When Warnings Become White Noise

Human psychology plays a crucial role here. When developers are bombarded with countless warnings, they naturally start to tune them out. It's a psychological defense mechanism against information overload.

The first few dozen alerts might receive careful attention. But as the volume increases, that scrutiny rapidly diminishes. Critical warnings get lost in the sea of mostly-irrelevant notifications.

A Balanced Approach

Automated security scanning isn't useless - it's just incomplete. These tools should be one component of a comprehensive security strategy, not the entire strategy itself.

Combine automated scanning with:

Manual security reviews
Penetration testing
Code reviews
Continuous security training
Context-aware threat modeling

The goal isn't to eliminate automated scanners but to use them intelligently. Treat them as helpful assistants, not infallible security oracles.

Ultimately, human expertise, contextual understanding, and a holistic approach to security will always outperform purely automated solutions. Technology is a tool - not a replacement for skilled security professionals.

At Cypress Data Defense, we help organizations navigate these complex security landscapes. We don't just run tools - we provide strategic guidance to make your security approach both robust and efficient.

Want to transform your application security strategy? Let's talk. info@cypressdatadefense.com.

How to Integrate Security Into a DevOps Cycle

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Today, DevOps is being integrated into organizations thanks to the many benefits that this structured approach can bring.

However, DevOps processes aren't restricted to development and operations and need to take in the security operations role to provide a genuinely holistic approach.

Companies are adopting DevOps but missing out on the most critical aspect - security. This is where DevSecOps comes into the picture. It has proven to be a game changer for many organizations.

DevSecOps is a transition every organization with a DevOps framework must look towards, for it can bring tremendous benefits to the organization. DevSecOps is a mindset that brings a combination of several disciplines, individuals, and operational processes that helps to create a higher level of security.

This post will help you understand the various security aspects that are covered by the adoption of DevSecOps and how it can enable organizations to create data security and privacy mechanisms that help consistently deploy secured applications:

What is DevSecOps?

In the traditional DevOps framework, security has not always been an integral part of the entire software development lifecycle. However, with DevSecOps, security gets built-in to the software, into the process, into the servers/containers/whatever, and into the configurations, rather than being a function that acts as a perimeter around the app or the data.

This ensures that security remains ingrained in each aspect of the development pipeline, creating a well-functioning solution that is highly secure and reliable.

DevSecOps is nothing but a collaborative framework of DevOps, where security is a shared responsibility that is integrated from start to finish. This mindset is vital, as it emphasizes that security is not just the security team’s domain but something that each member of the organization needs to think about. DevSecOps is short for development, security, and operations, and makes everyone accountable for security.

Ways to Integrate Security Into DevOps - DevSecOps

Organizations today have to release updates, security features, fixes, and other upgrades to their products, which are happening at a faster frequency as compared to the way it was done traditionally.

This change in software development and deployment has led to the adoption of DevOps, which, in essence, is a framework that uses a principle called CAMS.

CAMS is:

Culture: defines the protocols to facilitate mindset, communication, and collaboration to increase agility.
Automation: defines the processes that are automated to eliminate error-prone manual activity and enable consistency and efficiency.
Measurement: Continuous improvement is the benchmark for all DevOps processes, so the critical metric needs to be tracked and measured at every interval.
Sharing: defines the sharing of tools, discoveries and lessons learned to create a more efficient process.

In DevSecOps, this same culture of shared responsibility to enable faster and more agile decision making is leveraged. However, unlike DevOps, where security gets pushed out to a later stage, DevSecOps focuses on integrating proper security thinking and processes into each stage, enabling rapid development as soon as the security flaws are detected.

For organizations that have integrated DevOps, incorporating DevSecOps can happen in a few simple steps:

1. Change the Security Mindset

Often, there is a mindset that permeates within developers, security teams, and operations about disinterest in the other’s role. With DecSecOps, this mindset is eliminated as every member has to think along the same lines, incorporating security as a core concept rather than a standalone responsibility of the security team.

Developers primarily focus on building features that enhance user experience and improve overall performance, which makes them believe that the other functions are not as essential. However, without making security a priority, the well-functioning product may still never see the light of day!

Start by eliminating traditional mindsets to create an integrated security approach to make DevSecOps happen.

2. Improve Security Awareness with Training

According to a study, only 1 in 36 undergraduate computer science programs have made passing the cybersecurity course a graduation requirement.

Under such circumstances, developers and other teams’ disdain and lack of motivation to work on security best practices are likely. However, to steer them in the right direction takes hands-on training and creating an environment in which security is considered a priority.

Nurture a culture of learning and ensure your teams are provided with the required training to help them get on board to implement security thinking and awareness in design, development, coding, and testing.

3. Redefine Centralized Security

Like the DevOps framework, eliminating teams with their core responsibilities and expecting each member to focus on all aspects like development, operations, and security is farfetched.

While security will still be the core function of the security team, the operations and development teams will also need to help manage a few aspects of security.

Having a centralized team to monitor the process while redefining centralized security to establish risk tolerance and security controls help each team get on board with their accountability for implementing security best practices. If any, vulnerabilities can thus be easily identified and mitigated efficiently, rather than waiting until the very end, creating roadblocks for the overall release of the product.

4. Establish a Governance Structure for Cloud Services

The cloud is often misunderstood to mean a lack of security and controls compared to an on-premise framework where the teams can monitor and control every aspect of the system.

However, recent cloud security developments have created a framework where cloud security and development are just as secure and effective. At the same time, organizations get to embrace several benefits of adopting the cloud environment.

To establish a governance structure for your cloud, start by making small investments in aligning your business strategies to define a governing structure that:

Develops business scenarios that illustrate the acceptable use and allotment of cloud resources
Describes the architecture and framework within the cloud to help you effectively use it
Limits the subscription and installs user controls to ensure every user has only the access required without unintentionally introducing errors in the whole system

5. Maintain DevOps Accountability for Security

Finally, getting DevOps teams to be accountable for security may take some time and patience and initially run into its course of problems. But if you are focused on the ultimate goal of embracing the DevSecOps framework to effectively and efficiently tackle each approach holistically, maintaining DevOps accountability for security is necessary.

In several organizations where DevSecOps is being implemented, the workflow is quite similar to the traditional approach. Developers create the code and then expect the security teams to take it up from there and start the testing.

However, this framework in unworkable in the DevSecOps framework, as:

Security and testing teams queue up on issues to be addressed while developers are focused on building features and performance.
Application developers are confused with security operations and often write code without correctly estimating their security impact.

Thus, shifting accountability to DevOps is the only way forward. DevOps need to get their hands dirty with trying to solve security issues on their own, while the entire processes is managed by security teams who create a shared framework incorporating:

DevOps best practices: which provides the scripts and coding framework that the organization should abide by and follow to validate security controls at the right level easily
Security scorecards: to highlight and encourage each member to improve and collaborate on the security aspects of the product
Penetration testing: Having teams that can perform a penetration test of an application inspires teams to take security more seriously

Takeaways

Are you considering embracing the DevSecOps framework for your organization? Know that each organization is different and can have other goals or mechanisms to deal with security.

However, in the modern world, integrating security in each aspect of the organization helps deliver highly secure products that have security built into every aspect of its creation, from designing, development, testing, release, and implementation.

At Cypress Data Defense, we focus on bridging the gap between DevOps and security teams by helping them adopt DevSecOps into their software development process. Our security experts have helped clients globally to integrate security in their DevOps process and hence, make more secure, efficient, and powerful applications.

If you have any questions or feedback for us, please feel free to contact us and we’ll solve your queries as soon as possible.

Secure SDLC and Best Practices for Outsourcing

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Data security and privacy are critical for businesses today, and the prime aspect that software developers need to focus on. With data breaches and hacking getting more sophisticated, more common, and the repercussions more severe, organizations need to plan their safety checks and protocols diligently.

A secure software development life cycle (SDLC) enables the creation of a process where security is an integral part of every stage in the SDLC process. While this may seem trivial, not addressing security concerns at the right time can have a huge impact. Most enterprises have an SDLC process in place to streamline their software development process, but also need to think about integrating security to create a more sustainable product development.

However, the increasing risks and security threats associated with insecure applications have made it critical to integrate security into all the phases of the software development life cycle (SDLC), thus making it a secure SDLC process.

Maintaining and monitoring security aspects within the software development life cycle (SDLC) process can be complex, so if you are considering outsourcing your secure SDLC, here are a few things you need to understand:

What is a Secure SDLC, and Why is it Important For You?

The traditional software development life cycle model is used to develop code for applications focused on quickly developing feature-rich, efficient, and productive applications.

This often results in security issues being pushed into the background. That can lead to security vulnerabilities in the software program being detected only when it is too late, which is in production or post-production stages.

This is where a secure software development life cycle (SDLC) comes into play, as it provides coding methodologies and best practices that prioritize security in each stage of the SDLC.

Secure SDLC believes that prevention is better than cure, which implies it is better to detect and mitigate any risks or coding errors as soon as they are detected, ensuring these do not escalate into high-risk vulnerabilities that can significantly affect an organization.

Secure SDLC is nothing but a structured approach to application security, which helps organizations develop best practices for securing applications. It helps:

Ensures optimum security: In a secure SDLC, application security is continuously monitored for vulnerabilities, which results in better application quality and mitigation of business risks in the early stages.
Cost reduction: As security flaws are detected early on, the chances of any security flaw being detrimental to the overall organization is minimized.
Comply with security and regulatory norms: A Secure SDLC encourages a more structured approach towards security-related activities and regulations. This helps ensure applications are continuously released in a secure state as a matter of practice.
Wins customer's trust: Since security is looked into at each stage of the SDLC journey, customers are more likely to trust you as they see that special attention is paid to security.

Secure SDLC Outsourcing Best Practices

According to a study by Computer Economics, IT security is outsourced by 59% of the organizations, and most of these companies consider it as the top priority for their software.

If you are considering outsourcing your secure software development life cycle (SDLC), here are some recommended tips you need to consider:

1. Know Your Outsourcing Partner

When outsourcing your security and secure software development life cycle (SDLC) processes, you should be very careful about choosing the outsourcing partner. Knowing that security is a key aspect for your organization and your end customers, so choosing the right outsourcing service provider is critical.

To make sure you are making a well-informed decision, make sure you have a selection criterion and create a proper process for onboarding the vendor. Some of the key items that you should look into are:

Experience of the security agency in handling such requirements
Readiness and familiarity with your work methodology, especially when it comes to the secure SDLC processes
Knowledge of the latest tools, technologies, and coding practices prevalent in the industry
Confidentiality, IP access rights, and other legal as well as security considerations that need to be documented
Transparency and easy in communication, while also enabling your teams to stay efficient

While this list is just a starting point, there can be other items that you should consider and do a thorough background check before beginning the outsourcing processes.

2. Assess Your Risk

Have you performed a risk assessment of your current systems, customer requirements, and potential exposure of data that is communicating, stored, or modified in one of your software or systems?

If not, now is a good time to start and engage an experienced company to perform a risk audit before you outsource.

Some of the key checklists include:

Inventory of all the applications, security processes and security mechanisms that will be outsourced or shared with the security agency
Defined approach to the potential risk for each process and mitigation plan for it
Be sure to quantify the impact and establish a proper mechanism to ensure that every person on board is familiar with their responsibilities

Also, assess the security and infrastructure environment through which software development will flow: from design to production deployment.

3. Select the Right Outsourcing Engagement Model

Security outsourcing isn't just about handing over the security aspects and processes to the partner, as there will be several instances where the security agency needs to communicate and work with your teams.

To make sure these engagements are effective, choose an outsourcing engagement model that best fits your requirements.

For example, for secure software development life cycle (SDLC) outsourcing, you need to outline the roles and responsibilities of your team, the ownership of the security agency, and the processes that are going to be managed by you. You can choose from a remote developers model, managed projects model, or dedicated team model to help you start.

4. Take Hidden Costs Into Consideration

According to CIO magazine, “Depending on what is outsourced and to whom, studies show that an organization will end up spending at least 10 percent above that figure to set up the deal and manage it over the long haul.” Make sure you have understood and accounted for all the incurred costs and variable costs when signing.

Hidden expenses you need to consider when outsourcing are:

Benchmarking and analysis costs
Project transition and Knowledge Transfer time and cost
Resource management costs and cost of managing the outsourcing relationship

As a best practice, outline and be aware of each process and activity to help you get a rough estimate of the expenses you may incur when outsourcing security.

5. Provide Full Details and Specifications to the Service Provider

Once you have selected an outsourcing partner, you need to start being transparent and provide the complete details to ensure security aspects are appropriately managed. Share details to your files, processes, and ensure the partner is aware of their involvement in your secure software development life cycle (SDLC) process.

A transparent sharing of information is beneficial to both parties. The security agency can suggest best-practices and mitigation options and ensure you are on-track when it comes to a secure software development life cycle (SDLC).

6. Are they responsive and adaptable to your needs?

Finally, make sure you can completely trust the security agency and are confident that they are responsive and adaptable to your needs.

Although outsourcing will significantly lower your IT teams’ burden, they should also be informed that it is not wholly a third-party responsibility. Ensuring a secure SDLC process will require both sides to be open to change and adapt to the working patterns for a successful long-term relationship.

Software Outsourcing Can Be Secure

Adopting a secure software development life cycle is essential in today’s digital world. But implementing a secure software development life cycle (SDLC) process requires a security organization that understands that security is no longer optional and needs to be prioritized in your software delivery.

And outsourcing this security aspect is one of the most challenging jobs in the business, as you are involving an outside firm in an important role within your organization.

If you are ready to implement a secure software development life cycle (SDLC) in your organization, we have your requirements covered.

Cypress Data Security can help your organization to adapt and implement secure SDLC practices in your organization. Our secure SDLC implementations enable organizations to improve overall security, quality, and time to market for solution development.

This can provide considerable value to your organization as a secure software development life cycle (SDLC) practice helps you foster security best practices while improving operational efficiency.

If you’d like to talk to our security experts, please drop a comment or connect with us via email.

10 Best Practices for Application Security in the Cloud

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 15:04:10 GMT

The digital revolution allowed advanced technology to replace traditional processes, and cloud computing is the fastest growing technology in the segment.

According to Gartner, the global cloud market will grow to $266.4 billion in 2020, from $227.4 billion in 2019. This year alone, the rapid increase is mainly due to organizations adopting technology to gain several benefits, like faster time to market, flexible onboarding, and affordable solutions.

A survey found that 93% of companies are wary of using the cloud due to the security risks. However, in reality, the cloud can potentially offer the same kind of security and measures that any traditional on-premise environment does but potentially with some more capabilities.

Recognize that there are still security limitations in the cloud, especially with 3rd party applications. But, wherever you deploy, application security still needs to be addressed, in the cloud or on premise.

Here are some steps you can take to improve cloud application security and ensure the best practices are being followed in your organization:

1. Discover and Assess Cloud Apps

Most of us tend to take IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) or PaaS (Platform as a Service) security for granted and do not think twice before adding a new application or platform to the company's cloud environment. However, each new application that is added can pose a potential risk and should be evaluated accordingly.

Before selecting or adding a new cloud application, it is critical to do your due diligence regarding the vendor or the application.

Here are some of the best cloud security practices you should adopt to discover and assess cloud apps:

Use cloud discovery to analyze traffic logs collected by Microsoft Defender ATP and evaluate identified applications against a set catalog to verify the security and compliance requirements.
Configure application discovery policies to identify insecure, non-compliant applications that could pose a security threat to the application.
Monitor the cloud application permissions authorized by your users to manage OAuth apps and identify those that are potentially risky or suspicious.

2. Manage Access to Cloud Applications & User Behavior

As with several cloud applications and storage options, there is usually more than one user who regularly needs to access apps. To ensure that sensitive data is protected, set up user access permissions, and manage access to limit information access within the core group. Most cloud applications and providers allow you to configure multi-factor authentication (MFA) and Single Sign-on (SSO) to help you get started. Additional cloud application security steps that you could take are:

Ensure users are given minimal access privileged to the cloud resources that still allows them to fulfill their job responsibilities.
Give provision access to a resource instead of providing a fixed set of credentials to ensure that compromised credentials don’t lead to unauthorized access to the cloud.
Implement multi-factor authentication for every user and limit the number of users with administrator privileges.
Enforce a strong password policy that requires a minimum of 14 characters containing at least one upper case letter, one lower case letter, special character, and one number. Also limit the number of failed attempts of login to the cloud.
Enforce multi-factor authentication for all users

Apart from these security-related activities, you also need to take care of default credentials. Typically, every cloud application and environment comes with default user access controls that need to be appropriately set, so make sure you do so.

3. Apply Cloud Governance Policies

Cloud governance policies are essential to ensure you have security standards for all users to abide by when working within the cloud environment. This requires the use of monitoring mechanisms to ensure all established cloud security policies are adhered to.

Here are some best security-related practices that you should implement in your cloud governance policies:

Enforce authentication standards such as multi-factor authentication.
Establish hardening standards for virtual machines, containers, approved repositories, etc.
Include strong access management with clearly defined roles and rules, so you know who has access to what and why.

In addition, organizations can implement other cloud governance and cloud security policies to ensure strict monitoring of usage, storage, and sharing.

4. Identify, Categorize, and Protect Sensitive Data Stored in the Cloud

Cloud computing allows the sharing of folders and files among multiple users, and one needs to be proactive in enabling the right cloud security policies around file sharing and sensitive data. Make sure that you:

Identify sensitive data: Know which data or application you want to manage access to. Sensitive data like customer data, organizational policies, and other information like keys, hardcoded passwords, etc. that needs to be protected should ideally be in a separate folder or storage, with limited access.
Categorize & protect your files: Once this data is identified, categorize it in a different section, and set up encryption or other protective mechanisms to make sure only the intended audience can view this data.

5. Employ DLP with CASBs

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy in IaaS isn’t as good right now, but organizations want to focus on the use of CASBs (cloud access security brokers).

CASBs are cloud-based security software located between cloud service providers and cloud service consumers to enforce security, govern policies, and ensure compliance for cloud applications.

It includes various types of security policy enforcement such as single sign-on, authentication, authorization, device profiling, credential mapping, tokenization, encryption, malware detection/mitigation, logging, alerting, etc.

The primary goal of CASBs is to extend the security controls of an enterprise from their on-premise infrastructure to the cloud.

By employing CASBs, organizations can:

Identify which cloud services are in use, who is using them, and what the security risks they pose to the application data and the organization are.
Assess and select cloud services that meet their security and compliance requirements using security controls and a database of cloud services.
Identify unauthorized or insecure use of the cloud, including activity from both within the organization and outside (by end users) that compromise user accounts.
Protect organization data in the cloud by restricting certain types of sensitive data from being accessed, downloaded, or shared.

6. Restrict the Download of Sensitive Data to Risky or Insecure Devices

Despite the most stringent access controls, data loss often occurs due to files being downloaded to devices. When sharing any data or information externally, make sure to create security policies to block and protect downloads to unknown devices, and monitor low-trust sessions as much as possible.

This may seem like a simple security step but will go a long way in ensuring your data is protected and shared only with the right user group.

7. Enforce Real-Time Session Controls to Secure Collaboration with External Users

To gain better visibility and ensure secure collaboration in your cloud environment, you can create a session policy that lets you monitor sessions between internal and external users. This will enable you to track each session between your users, and more importantly, limit specific activities that are against application security and compliance standards.

Potentially risky or suspicious users can be monitored when they sign into applications and their actions are logged into the session. You can further evaluate these session logs and analyze user behavior to detect if they violate your company’s security policies.

Moreover, you can also prevent data exfiltration by blocking functions like cutting, copying, pasting, downloading, or printing of confidential data. Also, when a sensitive file is uploaded or shared among users, it’s important to ensure that the files have an appropriate label and protection.

Along with this, you can granularly block access for certain applications and users depending on various risk factors. For instance, you can block a user if they are using client certificates as a form of device management.

8. Automate & Remediate Cloud Application Security Risks

Information security is essential for all organizations, large or small, but these functions are often heavily under-staffed and under-funded. Using tools and automation can help the application security team stay on top of the game while not getting overwhelmed in high-risk situations.

Cloud automation helps improve application security and resilience within an organization because when sensitive tasks are automated, you do not need to rely on manual resource tracking and IT people logging into critical systems.

Moreover, the risk of human error is significantly reduced, as well as the likelihood of account compromise or malicious insiders attempting to breach cloud accounts drops down.

9. Malware Threat Protection

Malware threat protection is becoming increasingly difficult as attackers use advanced components to pose severe threats to the cloud infrastructure.

To address malware threats in the cloud, you can consider the following application security activities:

Organizations should stack up endpoint protection to the highest application security standards possible as it will help you detect most malware coming from endpoints like laptops, desktops, etc.
Create a BYOD (bring your own device) protection policy to ensure secure upload and download of files from unmanaged endpoints.
Ensure you use advanced threat protection tools and processes to limit the spread of malware to other networks in your enterprise.
Add a cloud-specific protective layer to all your cloud-based email applications to secure infrastructure, whether hosted on Gmail or Microsoft.

These application security processes can help you keep the cloud environment secure, especially if the potential vulnerabilities are hard to detect.

10. Secure IaaS Services and Custom Apps

Cloud platforms allow third-party applications or SaaS (Software as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) to be offered to their customers.

While this provides ease of use and customization as needed, integrating these applications into your cloud storage has its security risks.

Make sure you have a security configuration that identifies anomalies and detects potential security vulnerabilities to your environment.

To do so, you can use the recommended application security settings provided by the cloud provider and ensure using only reliable sources for IaaS and SaaS applications.

Takeaways

Despite the prevalent opinions on cloud computing, these data security policies and measures for the cloud make it just as secure as any other on-premises infrastructure. The risks are similar in both cases and can be mitigated with robust data security and compliance measures.

Security and privacy measures are necessary in both cases, and it takes a strong security team and monitoring to ensure complete optimization against any cybersecurity attacks. When it comes to data and cloud security, prevention is always better than a cure.

Cypress Data Defense's cloud security solution integrates the latest application security technologies with your cloud infrastructure. With the right technology, cloud security experts, and forethought, companies can leverage cloud computing benefits. If you’d like to talk to our security experts, please drop a comment below or connect with us.

How to Prevent Data Loss: 13 Simple Ways

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Data security cannot be overlooked today, especially with the rising cyber threat landscape and evolving attacks that are more difficult to track and address. A report found that in the first month of 2019 alone, over 3,800 publicly disclosed data breaches exposed 4.1 billion records.

Regardless of size, all businesses need to adopt better security measures to protect their data and prevent data loss. Not having adequate security plans in place for information security can result in severe consequences for businesses.

While providing data security isn’t a cakewalk, it is absolutely worth the time and effort. Encryption alone can provide significant protection to your data.

It’s best to integrate security within your organization as much as possible for quick detection and mitigation of security vulnerabilities.

Here are some simple ways you can prevent data loss and secure your business from cybersecurity attacks:

1. Build a Security-First Culture

According to a report, less than 50% of new employees receive cybersecurity awareness training and regular updates on security throughout their careers.

This calls for a security-first culture where the silo culture is broken down and a practice of making security everyone’s shared responsibility across the organization is adopted.

It’s an indirect way to prepare your organization to prevent data loss.

Ensure the security team is involved through all stages of the business from top management, to operations. By integrating security at all stages, you encourage cross-collaboration and enhance communication.

Cybersecurity practices are not just limited to addressing known risks, rather also focusing on future needs and the ever-changing cybersecurity threat landscape.

Creating a security-first culture will help employees stay updated with the latest cybersecurity threats and ways to address them. This can be done by organizing cybersecurity awareness programs or training on a regular basis.

2. Secure Database Access

Database security is an extremely important aspect of data loss prevention. Here are some best practices for securing database access:

Database Hardening

One of the best ways to prevent data loss is to secure a database by hardening it as much as possible. Immediately look to disable or uninstall features or services that you are not using. Ensure that you only keep services that are absolutely needed for your operations.

Incorporating a fine-grained access control can also contribute to database hardening by limiting the access and privileges of users to a minimum (only up to the functions or applications they need access to perform their job responsibilities).

Once you have performed all of these actions, audit the hardened configuration by using an automated tool if necessary. Alternatively, you can look for more database hardening guidelines at CIS and get help from a security expert and have them conduct an audit of your database.

Manage Database Access Tightly

Focus on users created within the database and limit their access controls to tables, stored procedures, views, etc that could modify the database or have an impact on the overall database security.

Along with this, you need to carefully examine who has access to what. For example, can users create data, modify data, delete data, or just view data? This will give you better visibility into your database access and allow you to enforce stringent access policies to ensure security and prevent data loss.

Finally, you need to ensure that a single database flaw doesn’t impact your entire system, so you’ll have to reduce dependencies to limit the impact of a problem and thus, avoid blast radius.

You need to take into account that if a single user account is compromised, the scale of data loss, and if you have the needed data recovery plan (we’ll discuss this later in the article).

Secure Authentication

Database accounts should have strong password policies with minimum permissions required to complete their job. Administrative access should require multi-factor authentication and all user privileges should be limited as finely grained as possible.

Secure Communication

Most databases support a wide variety of communication methods including APIs, services, etc. Some of these methods are secure (authenticated and encrypted) while others are insecure (unauthenticated and unencrypted).

It’s recommended that you should rely more on secure communication to protect databases from unauthorized access. You may only be communicating on the internal network, but those communications should be secured regardless. It’s a crucial strategy to prevent data loss.

3. Application Whitelist

Application whitelisting is a stronger security control that allows only pre-approved and specific programs to run. Any other program that is not whitelisted is automatically blocked by the system.

This method places control over which programs are secure and authorized to run on a network or on a user’s machine. It ensures that users cannot run malicious or unauthorized programs that may be harmful to the organization.

What’s more interesting is that application whitelisting doesn’t just limit the number of authorized programs but also streamlines inventory management. In simple words, organizations often grant access to an array of applications, even if it’s irrelevant to many users’ roles.

While application whitelisting seems to be an all-in-one security solution to prevent data loss, it’s not a replacement for traditional security practices, rather it’s a supplement to them. Many penetration testers will attest that application whitelisting alone isn’t sufficient as many standard applications such as PowerShell can be abused.

You can use application whitelisting in conjunction with both emerging and standard security technologies to ensure that your organization is well-protected from the threat landscape. It’s a great way to ensure that you are prepared to prevent data loss.

4. Encrypt Sensitive Data

Encryption is one of the most basic yet effective preventive measures to be taken for preventing data loss. End-to-end encryption enhances data protection regardless of whether the data is in a private or public cloud, on-device, or in transit.

The primary goal of encryption is to provide confidentiality and drive key security processes like authentication, authorization, integrity, and non-repudiation.

Properly implemented strong encryption algorithms are one of the few things that you can rely on when it comes to DLP. Companies can incorporate encryption in security lifecycle processes to provide persistent data protection.

As always, secure key management is paramount for data security and the prevention of data loss.

5. Implement Digital Identity

Digital identity is the unique representation of a user or a program that helps authenticate that individual or an entity is who they claim to be. It can consist of the credentials necessary to gain access to a network or system, or advanced identifiers like voice recognition, face recognition, and biometrics.

It is frequently said that identity is the new perimeter, and in many respects, it is. Having a robust and tested identity management can is a critical element of your overall security posture.

By implementing digital identity only authorized users will be able to access devices, networks, and data. While this isn’t the strongest security measure, it can significantly help reduce the likelihood of unauthorized access, theft, or data loss.

6. Enforce Access Controls

In conjunction with identity management, access control is critical to prevent data loss. Access control is the process of granting or denying specific access from a program, process, or user. It also involves the process of allowing and revoking those privileges. At a high level, access controls help facilitate the selective restriction of access to data.

While enforcing access control strengthens the overall security of an organization, these systems are complex and can be challenging to manage in a dynamic environment. Focus on least privilege and maintaining permissions as fine grained as possible.

When a user or program is added to an access control system, the administrators should use an automated provisioning system to set up permissions and privileges based on access control frameworks, workflows, and job responsibilities.

In today’s dynamic IT environment, access control must be regarded as a powerful technology infrastructure that uses the most sophisticated tools and processes to prevent data loss and the inherent risks that come with it.

7. Use Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) Tools

SIEM is a set of services and tools that offers insights and can help identify incidents by pulling together and analyzing logs and activities from a myriad of sources within an IT environment. It provides real-time visibility across a company’s information security systems.

Additionally, it also offers event log management and automatic security event notifications to keep concerned personnel updated. SIEM tools and software typically come with dashboards for security issues and methods for alerts.

By using SIEM tools for data loss prevention, you can monitor all of your sources of network security information like operating systems, servers, firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, and antivirus software and identify security flaws or vulnerabilities.

Once you have identified security incidents, you can quickly address them before they scale and become a bigger threat to your data. Keep this in mind while formulating your data loss prevention strategy.

8. Patch and Update your Software

Duh, patching should be a crucial element of any business’s data loss prevention strategy, regardless of whether you have a small business with a few devices and software, or a big organization with plenty of users and devices.

Attackers love security vulnerabilities. They can exploit these vulnerabilities to infect your computer or modify data in your database, leak sensitive data, and do much more damage to your organization’s integrity.

If you want to prevent data loss, you need to pay attention to it.

Software updates help protect your data from unauthorized users or attackers by fixing security vulnerabilities present in the software.

Updating your software proactively on a regular basis safeguards you from the threat and impact of data loss - in terms of severity, risk, and cost. Also, updates are not just limited to security patches, but they also come with new features and improvements that may strengthen your overall security.

9. Protect Your Hardware

Hardware security is one of the most underrated yet crucial methods of data loss prevention. It plays a key role in ensuring the authenticity and trust of electronic systems and integrated circuits (ICs).

It mainly consists of physical security which includes three important components: access control, surveillance, and testing. Hardening measures include locks, fencing, access control cards, fire suppression systems, and biometric access control systems.

Here are some quick ways to restrict access to your hardware and prevent data loss:

Install servers and related equipment in a restricted, locked access room.
Restrict access to USB consoles, which can provide access to important data or give more powerful access than SSH connections.
Restrict access to hot-swap and hot-plug devices in particular as they can be easily removed.
Store spare customer-replaceable units (CRUs) or fire-replaceable units (FRUs) in a locked room. Restrict access to the room to only authorized personnel.

10. Data backup

One of the biggest defenses in data loss prevention is data backups. This is especially true for ransomware. Create a data backup strategy that can protect your business by helping to recover or restore your data that has been corrupted or lost. Ensure you have good backups and offline backups as well.

Regular Data Backups

Data backups should be scheduled on a regular basis - whether it be hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly - having a routine schedule for data backups helps build continuity and guarantees better protection against data loss.

If you have any sensitive data, whether it is emails, spreadsheets, documents, software, databases, decryption keys, or any other stored data on your devices, make sure you back it up regularly but make sure that the standard data protection mechanisms are in place. Many attackers go to backups to find sensitive data that is not protected as it is in the primary source.

Test Your Backup Solution

Having a backup solution is one thing, but whether or not if it accurately works and recovers data at the time of an emergency is another.

Often data backups fail and result in data corruption or incomplete files. Businesses should proactively ensure that data backups contain the most up-to-date information.

Regular, frequency backup testing is necessary to identify issues with backup quality, storage, or performance. This lets you fix issues before any major disturbance occurs and impacts your data.

We also recommend performing restore tests after regular backups to verify if all the data has been copied and validated successfully.

Diversify Your Backups

Diversification in data backups is certainly a key aspect of data storage. Make sure that copies of data backup are sent to multiple locations. There is a wide variety of data backup and storage solutions available such as cloud backup systems, virtualization, and local drives.

By diversifying your backups, you can protect the interests of your business in times of data breach or catastrophe. Because, let’s face it, protecting data at all times is a non-negotiable requirement for all businesses to ensure uninterrupted operations.

To prevent data loss, you need to make sure that your organization diversifies your data backups.

11. Create MDM Policies

Mobile device management (MDM) policies help companies secure and protect their mobile devices to ensure that all personnel use them appropriately and that devices can be secured/wiped if they are lost.

These policies can go a long way in the prevention of data loss.

MDM policies typically include the process your company needs to approve mobile devices, assign employees responsibilities using mobile devices for corporate data, designing security practices, etc.

You should address security-related concerns such as access to company-owned resources, use of personal devices, passwords, data storage, data sharing, and use of device locks.

Loss of a single device can potentially have a grave impact on your business. Understand your exposure, seek to minimize it, and know whom to contact WHEN something is lost.

12. Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is the process of detecting and preventing data breaches, unwanted alteration, and exfiltration of sensitive data. It helps monitor data access and sharing by end users to identify anomalies or unusual behavior.

DLP tools are often used to classify and prioritize data security. On top of this, DLP policies are also used to meet data regulatory compliance such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.

By implementing DLP in your organization, you can protect personally identifiable information (PII), protect Intellectual property (IP) consisting of sensitive information, achieve in-depth data visibility, and secure your mobile workforce in BYOD environments as well.

Overall, data loss prevention policies and tools play a big role in data protection - one that’s unavoidable by organizations and is highly crucial to secure data.

Takeaways

There are plenty of ways you can prevent data loss. However, it ultimately boils down to what your organizational needs are, the sensitivity of your data, and the impact it would have if it were to become compromised in any manner.

It’s all about how data loss can impact your business.

No organization wants to suffer a data breach that could have been avoided with a simple few steps in the right direction, and that’s where we step in.

We can help you prevent data loss and secure your business.

At Cypress Data Defense, we create tailor-made security strategies and processes that best suit organizations. Right from the encryption levels to instilling a security-first culture throughout your organization by conducting regular training sessions, our security experts integrate security as a core component of organizations.

If you already have a security team on board, we can help you create a more robust security roadmap that helps you address and eliminate your security vulnerabilities.

If you want to know more about data security and prevention of data loss, check out our blog for more information.

How To Secure Your Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 15:04:10 GMT

In most organizations, the Software Development Life Cycle(SDLC) is a well-defined process that includes conception, creation, release, and operation of the software. This process can be applied in several ways and models, but security concerns must also be addressed.

With the increasing number of concerns and risks associated with insecure software solutions, security needs to be integrated within the development process rather than a stand-alone activity.

Thus, adopting a secure Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) strategy is vital for organizations to ensure they continually release secure software.

Why Should You Care About a Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)?

While the technology being used to create software has progressed rapidly, the security measures used to secure the software haven't always kept pace. This is a problem.

According to a recent report from Symantec, the US ranks #1 on the list of most vulnerable countries in terms of threats like web attacks, phishing, malware, ransomware, spam, and bots followed by China and India.

A secure SDLC helps create a business process where security is part of every stage in the SDLC process. While this may seem trivial to start with, the long-term benefits are significant.

According to a survey, fixing a security bug when identified in the analysis or requirement stage is around $10. The same bug, if identified later on in the deployment stage of requiring a complete change in the application’s architecture, can cost almost $2000 or more.

A secure SDLC ensures that security activities such as code review, penetration testing, and architecture analysis are an integral part of the development process.

The primary benefits of using a secure Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) include:

Early identification of vulnerabilities in the application security.
More secure software as security is a continuous concern.
Stakeholders are aware of the security risks in real-time.
Reduced cost, time, and effort to mitigate security risks as they are detected early in the SDLC.
An overall reduction in business risks for the enterprise.

Thus, creating a process where the security aspects are tested and fixed before they run into production is critical to ensure that the application doesn’t compromise the entire system.

How Does it Work?

For organizations that already have an SDLC process in place, security will be an additional aspect that needs to be embedded into all the phases of the SDLC.

Throughout the stages, security mechanisms like automated detection, prioritization and remediation tools need to be integrated with the code repositories and other systems to resolve any bugs or potential risks as soon as they arise.

That being said, here are the specific phases of integrating security into your software development life cycle (SDLC):

Planning

The first step in the SDLC process is the most critical since proper planning can help create an efficient project delivery by helping each team to be focused. The planning phase is where security and development teams get details on the project requirements and start planning the execution of the entire project.

Requirements and Analysis

The second phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC) process, requirements and analysis, is when the decisions on vital elements like requirements gathering, technology, frameworks, and languages are considered.

It requires a detailed understanding of the tools, resources, and other components required to execute the project, while also considering the vulnerabilities that may threaten the overall application security.

Once the analysis and requirement understanding is done, it is vital to make the appropriate choices through design and development.

To ensure that security considerations are also integrated into the overall project plan, enterprises can take the following steps:

Access customer needs: Depending on the end product being designed, you need to create a list of security requirements that need to be included as part of the entire project. One of the primary goals of this is to not only strengthen application security, but to also make it as easy as possible for the development team to code securely.
Incorporate industry-standards on security: Once the initial planning is completed, developers need to include and abide by the industry-standard compliance practices and policies. Application security features that are standard to the industry need to be included as an essential requirement, while additional security features can be added during delivery. So don’t go trying to roll your own authentication or session management. There are good strong references for this, use those.
Assign responsibility for software security: Before you start development, it is vital to have a team responsible for the application security. Assign the role to the security team responsible for doing quality checks and test each aspect of the solution. Develop security stories as part of the lifecycle and continually do threat modeling to feed these stories.
Choose the right architecture: When planning, developers need to think about which common risks might require attention during development, and prepare for them. Depending on the architecture and design of the application, security requirements need to be included accordingly. Again, the goal is to have the architecture make it easy for the developers to code securely and have secure code if they follow established patterns.

Architecture and Design

The third phase ensures that teams follow the prescribed architecture and design guidelines that are analyzed during the previous stage.

During the architecture and design process, the entire strategy is defined that can then help the development process run smoothly. Methods like architecture risk analysis, threat modeling, and others make the development process much more streamlined and secure.

Along with this, detecting the vulnerabilities during the early stage also helps ensure they do not end up damaging the application or the system during the later stages.

Development

Once the strategy and planning stages are completed, the software development life cycle (SDLC) moves into actually getting the job done in its development stage. In this stage, developers build code using secure coding standards and ensure their systems are working within the set security frameworks.

While performing the usual code review to ensure the project has the specified features and functions, developers need to pay attention to any security vulnerabilities in the code.

During this phase, you will continue doing threat modeling but will also incorporate static analysis tools (SAST) and start standing up your dynamic analysis tools (DAST) as well.

Testing

Once the development process has commenced, the next stage of the software development life cycle (SDLC) stage is all about testing and verification.

Beyond SAST and DAST, the testing phase includes security tests, application testing, penetration testing, and other DevSecOps automation test processes. These will review containers, configurations, and overall security as you prepare to deploy.

While testing is a separate stage, it is often conducted even while the product development is underway, ensuring that testing is a continuous process rather than stand-alone.

Maintenance

The final stage in the SDLC process is called deployment or operations, but the life cycle doesn’t just end there for security frameworks. Once the software is deployed, the maintenance and continuous monitoring of the various processes and executions are initiated.

The maintenance stage is where the security teams continuously analyze and evaluate the progress of the solution while mitigating any risks or activities that are suspicious. Libraries may need to be updated, new patches may need to be rolled out. You cannot just release and forget it, you must maintain.

Takeaways

As the threat landscape change and security requirements get more stringent, organizations need to enable best practices in the entire SDLC process when creating future iterations or new products. No matter the methodology or organization strength, a secure software development life cycle (SDLC) process ensures the streamlined security to ensure it is deployed in the system only after a thorough security test process.

Are you ready to get a secure software development life cycle (SDLC) implemented in your organization? If so, we have your requirements covered.

Cypress Data Security has expertise in ensuring that organizations can quickly adapt and implement the best security practices in every stage of the SDLC process. This helps to improve overall security, quality, and time to market for solution development. With a focus on delivering improved deployment and greater operational efficiency while integrating security best-practices, our process can add considerable value to your overall business.

If you’d like to talk to our security experts, please drop a comment below or connect with us via email.

What is DevSecOps, and How Does it Help Build Secure Web Applications?

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 15:04:10 GMT

The threats for application privacy, [application security](https://www.cypressdatadefense.com/blog/application-security-best-practices/), and cyberattacks always loom large. Despite the best efforts of organizations and individuals to protect their applications, there are times when we let our guard down. This is an opportunity for a hacker or cyber attacker.

To help protect themselves from cyberattacks, enterprises are adopting DevSecOps – a combination of Development, Security, and Operations – to tap into security vulnerabilities and mitigate them in a timely manner.

In a nutshell, DevSecOps aims to minimize vulnerabilities and squeeze security within the IT infrastructure to empower business operations with heightened security measures.

It aims to bake application security into the software development lifecycle, with secure coding and testing automation, rather than bolting it in a later stage of the pipeline, like most traditional software development methods.

Before we dive into why you should care about DevSecOps and how it actually helps improve web application security, let’s take a look at what DevSecOps is.

What is DevSecOps?

DevOps is a new trend in the IT industry. DevOps takes full advantage of agility and responsiveness, enabling IT teams to be efficient and allow a faster turnaround time.

Adding to the application security aspect, DevSecOps puts security an integral element to the organization’s development and operations.

DevSecOps is a methodology that creates an environment where security, operations, and development go hand-in-hand.

It makes every member of the team accountable for safety, implementing security disciplines, and actions across each process. This takes the DevOps approach to be more integral than just the IT security team’s responsibility.

Let’s have a look at the DevSecOps workflow which is as follows:

A developer creates a code within a system.
The changes are made to the system.
Other developers retrieve this code from the system and carry out analysis of the static code to identify any security risks or bugs in the code quality.
A test environment is created wherein the application is deployed, and the security configuration is applied to the system.
The test automation suite executes the newly deployed application to test back-end, UI, integration, API, and other security checks.
Once the application passes the test, the code is deployed in the production environment.
Additionally, the deployed code in the production environment is continuously monitored to access any active security threats.

By ensuring security is part of every software development lifecycle, the DevSecOps framework allows security to be built into applications rather than an add-on. This helps lower the cost of compliance and creates a faster delivery model, where security is part of each delivery lifecycle.

Why is DevSecOps Important?

Organizations should integrate DevSecOps to empower security into every part of the DevOps life cycle, including design, development, test, release, support, and maintenance.

In DevSecOps, security is the shared responsibility of everyone in the DevOps value chain. This vital shift in enabling a culture of security is ever-present in every aspect of the organization, and the process has significant benefits.

Advantages of DevSecOps include:

Faster speed and greater agility for security teams to deal with issues while ensuring compliance standards are always met.
Faster response to change and innovation.
Better collaboration between teams and quicker communication.
Early identification of vulnerabilities in the code ensuring that they are detected and fixed before implementation in the actual environment.

Implement DevSecOps With Cypress Data Defense

The benefits of DevSecOps are undeniable, and Gartner’s research indicates that DevSecOps will be embedded into 80% of rapid development teams by 2021.

Basically, DevSecOps attempts to fully integrate security testing into the continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. Meanwhile, it also focuses on building up the knowledge and skills needed in the development team so that they can handle a decent amount of security test results at their level.

Now, automation plays a big role in integrating security into DevOps processes. Automated tools are widely used to reduce the time taken to identify and mitigate security vulnerabilities, as well as increase efficiency of the entire security testing process. This is where Cypress Data Defense steps in.

We have a team of security experts empowered with robust security tools and technologies to help companies bake security into their software development life cycles.

No Delay in Fixing Security

Security is a reactionary aspect for many organizations, where application security mechanisms are implemented after a problem has occurred. In addition, enterprises are concerned that integrating security into the DevOps cycle could cause a delay in delivery.

However, a DevSecOps approach calls for a cultural and technical shift that helps enterprises address security vulnerabilities more effectively, in real-time. Security teams should be considered as a valuable asset that helps prevent slowdowns and unexpected burnouts rather than a hindrance to agility.

DevSecOps addresses security vulnerabilities as soon as they are discovered and in real-time, which means early identification and mitigation. Thus, security issues are fixed before they can have a significant impact on the entire operation, be it the development process or the delivery timelines.

Moreover, security and development teams use automated tools and technologies to further speed up the process of embedding security into the development environment. Ultimately, it helps create a more secure, robust, application for the end users without compromising delivery timelines.

Reduce your Vulnerabilities

Developers often use open-source software in applications without really using secure coding best practices or reviewing the code in their open-source libraries. This can pose a huge threat to the application’s security as it might have unknown or hidden security vulnerabilities that could impact the application in its deployment stage if identified during a much later stage.

Now, DevSecOps reduces security vulnerabilities by maximizing the test coverage and intensifying the automation of security processes.

Developers can use automated DevSecOps tools to detect if their open-source code is causing contextual or other security vulnerabilities in the code, and what their impact on the dependent code is.

Code dependency checks are an important part of DevSecOps, and utilities such as the OWASP can help ensure that you steer away from code with known vulnerabilities for your web application.

This helps reduce the risk of cybercrime and related incidents, through proper security monitoring and auditing.

Moreover, DevSecOps also fosters an essential culture in the organization, one that enforces that security is a shared responsibility, which enhances transparency among different teams. With every member of the team being involved in ensuring that security requirements are taken care of, it ensures an overall audit is completed before the end-user uses the product.

Continuous Improvement, Continuous Security

In a DevSecOps environment, security is a continuous process with incremental safety improvements in the CI/CD pipeline. This ensures that vulnerabilities are not just detected and resolved, but also facilitates continuous improvement and continuous security.

The changes and enhancements inadvertently help create a security mechanism present in every aspect of the development life cycle, even once the product goes live.

Continuous security testing helps ensure that the application is stable and risks are mitigated to help create a reliable security mechanism.

The DevSecOps approach helps companies address security vulnerabilities in real-time and in a more efficient manner. However, this requires a tactical and cultural shift, for security needs to be embedded into every process in the software development lifecycle while also being monitored stringently.

Ready to Build Secure Web Applications?

The verdict is clear: DevSecOps is a must-have for organizations looking to bolster their security practices and improve overall security mechanisms of their software systems. In the modern world, security is not just a one-time task but also an endeavor that needs to be a constant practice to ensure optimal protection.

That is difficult to achieve given the faster turnaround time required, while threats and external hacking become increasingly sophisticated. In this environment, DevSecOps adds an added automation testing layer to help create solutions built with industry best practices to help improve security, vulnerability, and agility of the entire operation.

Cypress Data Security standardizes the effort to accelerate the adoption of DevSecOps into the entire process, which in turn improves overall security, quality, and time to market for the organization. Connect with our security experts to understand how DevSecOps can add significant benefits by simply dropping a comment below or emailing us.

Advantages of a Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Most organizations have an SDLC process in place that helps them streamline their development process. However, the rising complexity and number of business risks associated with insecure applications have made it necessary to integrate security into all the stages of the software development life cycle (SDLC), thus making it a secure SDLC.

Moreover, attackers are increasingly becoming more sophisticated in exploiting security vulnerabilities and attacking businesses. Cyberattacks are now more difficult to trace, let alone address.

Companies adopt a secure software development life cycle approach to detect and mitigate security threats. As such, it is not limited to developers or the security team. Cross-functional teams can easily adopt a secure SDLC mechanism to facilitate better security across various stages of the SDLC.

Let’s examine what a secure software development life cycle (SDLC) really means and why you should consider adopting one.

What is a Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)?

A secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC) is a framework that defines the entire development process for building a software product while integrating security at all stages—from the planning to the design, development, testing, and deployment stages.

Typically, secure software development lifecycle processes are divided into the following stages:

Phase 1: Requirement Collection and Analysis

This stage establishes the software application's security requirements. Security experts analyze the application's key security risks, such as functionality, the type of information application being used, etc. It also includes an internal security risk assessment and audit to avoid future conflicts.

Phase 2: Design

During this stage, security is built into the design of the software application. We perform threat modeling, which has four stages: decomposing the application, categorizing, prioritizing, and mitigating security risks. We also design countermeasures to address the security threats identified and the security requirements.

Phase 3: Development

In the development phase, we ensure that code is developed securely using security controls identified during the design phase. Organizations also host training sessions for developers to help them better understand the secure software development life cycle and enable them to perform unit testing of application security features. Also, the developers' code is reviewed to ensure it does not introduce security vulnerabilities.

Phase 4: Testing

Once the application is in the testing phase, it is checked to ensure that it meets security standards and in-depth security testing is performed, including penetration testing, integration testing, further static code analysis, dynamic analysis, etc.

Phase 5: Deployment & Maintenance

In the deployment phase, all security controls are checked once more, including secure code review (static analysis), dynamic, configuration, container security, etc., and then deployed. After that, continuous monitoring and mitigation programs are run to identify security vulnerabilities in running applications and address them in a timely manner.

Importance Of a Secure Software Development Life Cycle

As enterprises compete to stay ahead of their competition, they aim to deliver rapid software program releases to their customers with state-of-the-art features. Coming up with innovative solutions and developing them alone is a big challenge in itself, let alone ensuring the software is secure.

Instead of just performing security testing at the end, when the pressure’s high and you’re closing in on your deadline, it’s much better and easier to embed security into all stages. Contrary to popular belief, which is that security holds back the development process, a secure SDLC is an efficient and effective way to bake security into different stages of the development process.

It brings together all the stakeholders involved in the project to ensure that the software application is secure.

Developers can begin by educating themselves on the best secure coding practices and frameworks for better security. They should also consider using automated tools to identify security risks in the code quickly.

In addition to this, the management team can also leverage a secure SDLC to design a strategic approach for a more secure product. For instance, they can perform a gap analysis to understand what policies/activities currently exist in their organization and their effectiveness.

Setting up security policies that not only help you with high-level concerns like compliance but also allow you to embed it at the most basic level is necessary. If this sounds overwhelming, you can hire security experts who can assess your security needs and devise a roadmap that helps your organization enhance your security.

Top Advantages of a Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

There are countless advantages of using a secure software development life cycle. Here are some of the top ones that you should know about.

Early identification of security vulnerabilities helps reduce costs to implement security controls and mitigation processes of vulnerabilities. The security vulnerabilities are fixed during the development process, instead of deploying patching software, which is much more costly when compared to addressing the problem in real-time during the SDLC.
Another advantage of secure SDLC is it helps build a culture of security that is more likely to catch issues not only in development but in other areas of an organization as well.
Since security is integrated from the design stage in a secure SDLC, important security decisions are documented before development begins. Both the management and development team are aware of the project's security risks and concerns. This, in turn, helps fine-tune the development strategy to ensure secure code is built as the SDLC progresses.
One of the major advantages of a secure SDLC is that it helps reduce the organization's intrinsic business risks. Whether it’s common security attacks like SQL or XML injections or critical security issues like DoS (denial of service), companies that fall victim to cybersecurity attacks tend to lose a lot more than anticipated.

Data breaches can damage market reputation and stock value, weaken customer relationships, reduce customer retention rates, and decrease sales. A secure SDLC helps prevent most security vulnerabilities in a timely manner, thereby protecting an organization from several cyberattacks.

Is a Secure Software Development Life Cycle Right for You?

Adopting a secure software development life cycle is the need of the hour. We understand that projects and applications have advanced and complex features, but security is no longer optional or a bottleneck for your development process.

Our security teams identify where and how security vulnerabilities can impact your software and applications. While you focus on your operations and delivery, we take care of the “secure” part of your SDLC for your projects.

At Cypress Data Defense, we focus on integrating security into all stages of the SDLC to ensure you don’t face the wrath of cybersecurity attacks and lose out on your customers’ data.

We perform threat modeling, create security test cases, conduct penetration testing, and other tests throughout the SDLC process. By leveraging automated tools and working with expert security testers, we work efficiently and help you cut costs for your projects. You can reach out to us here.

What is an Agile SDLC Model and What Are its Advantages?

Thu, 20 Aug 2020 15:04:10 GMT

If you have experience as an engineer in the past two decades, you’ve probably heard the term “Agile” used quite a bit. There are a lot of different versions and adaptations of Agile that are tailored to business needs.

While some companies prefer to stick with traditional software development methods (as they are more convenient and members are used to it), others prefer using more secure, flexible, and high-quality software production methods like Agile.

The need to adopt the Agile model has stemmed from the fact that, over the years, as technology has evolved, so have customer needs and expectations. Traditional software development methods are no longer as efficient and effective as they were for many organizations. Constant demands for better features and updates have changed the software development industry, and different development approaches have been needed.

But what is an Agile SDLC model? Why should you adopt it? Is it an affordable solution that even small to medium scale businesses (SMBs) can adopt? Let’s take a closer look.

What is an Agile SDLC Model?

First, SDLC stands for Software Development Life Cycle. An Agile SDLC model is a combination of incremental and iterative software development models that focuses on continuously delivering high-quality software while reducing project overhead and increasing business value.

The project progresses in regularly iterated cycles, known as “sprints,” which usually last two to four weeks but can be longer or shorter depending on need. Every iteration requires cross-functional teams to collaborate on various aspects like planning, requirement analysis, design, coding, unit testing, security testing, integration testing, etc.

The Agile model manifesto promotes software development in small, quick steps. It is based on continuous iterations of software that allow companies to release updates to users more frequently.

Traditional SDLC vs Agile SDLC Model: A Comparison

The primary difference between a traditional SDLC and an Agile SDLC is the sequence of project phases. In traditional development methodologies, the sequence of the project development process is linear. In contrast, Agile is iterative but with short iterations (older iterative SDLCs often had many months long iterations).

In a traditional SDLC, the software development team has to make a detailed overview of all the requirements that might come up in the future regarding the design and development of the software. This makes traditional SDLC more challenging and time-consuming.

On the other hand, the Agile SDLC model is quite flexible. The Agile software development team determines the scope of required changes based on customer needs and goes through the cycle of analysis, design, development, and testing before every release. This allows the team to release small changes into the production environment instead of a single major update.

Regarding security, both the traditional SDLC and the Agile SDLC models can do it well or poorly. You just need to plan on involving security early in both lifecycles.

Benefits of the Agile SDLC Model

Here are some of the top benefits of the Agile SDLC model that you should know about:

Stakeholder Engagement

One of the major benefits of an Agile SDLC is that it provides several opportunities for stakeholders and team members to engage with each other before, during, and after each sprint.

Agile offers clients a unique opportunity to be more involved throughout the software development life cycle, from the design phase to prioritizing features, iteration planning, and review sessions to the final release.

By involving your client in every step of the software development life cycle, you potentially increase collaboration between the team and the client, thereby providing more opportunities for the team to understand the client’s expectations better.

Continuous delivery also builds the client’s trust in the team's ability to deliver high-quality working software, encouraging them to be more engaged with the organization.

Predictable Costs and Schedule

Since each sprint is of a fixed duration, companies can predict the entire project's cost and limit the amount of work the team can perform during a fixed schedule. With a fixed number of sprints, the company can calculate individual development team speed, project timelines, budget estimates, product backlog, or other requirements.

Of course, this is dependent upon completing all tasks in sprints. However, like traditional methodologies, issues arise, and projects can definitely run late and over budget. However, these issues may be detected earlier in Agile projects.

If the ROI outweighs the project's cost, a company may decide to take the project further. However, if the ROI does not meet the company’s expectations, they can easily predict it and understand if a project is feasible, and more importantly, profitable for the organization.

In addition to this, companies also consider clients’ estimates and their needs, which improves decision-making about the need for additional iterations and the priority of features.

Team Efficiency

Another popular benefit of the Agile SDLC model is that Agile teams are known to be highly efficient at completing projects. Since Agile teams share a collaborative environment, it tends to produce a ripple effect on efficiencies as well. Usually, this is due to improved communication of needs that minimizes the degree of rework.

Scalability

Two major deal breakers for companies to decide whether they want to work on a project or not are time and cost. It includes questions like:

How long will the project take to complete?
What will it cost?
Is it worth the initial investment?
What is the ROI of the project in the long run?
How can we best utilize the resources and people available at hand?

The last question is the most important as it holds a lot of value for companies who still struggle with predicting the feasibility of a project or understanding their team’s capabilities. Agile SDLC provides a way to identify the key stakeholders, determine a project’s viability, and identify whether the project will scale well as the company grows.

Focuses on Business Value

By breaking down the silos and adopting an Agile SDLC, companies can focus more on business value instead of software development issues. This is because the Agile SDLC model lets the team understand what’s more important for the client’s business and priorities.

Once they understand these things, they are able to deliver features that are just right for their clients’ businesses and provide the most value.

Improves Quality

An Agile SDLC offers high-quality software, as the end user performs testing during the early stages of the SDLC to ensure that the product is released in the desired state. It also helps members, like security team experts, identify and address security vulnerabilities early in the development phase if they are engaged early.

Takeaways

Agile SDLC is an excellent software development method for businesses that constantly release software to meet customers’ needs and client requirements. One of the major benefits of an Agile SDLC is that it promotes cross-functional team collaboration and feedback sharing. This means different teams work together to create better quality software while aligning with client requirements.

At Cypress Data Defense, we focus on implementing a secure SDLC to ensure better software security. We perform threat modeling to analyze architectural risks, determine application security risks, and identify vulnerabilities in your system. We also conduct code reviews to ensure that no vulnerabilities are present in the code.

If you have any questions or want to discuss your project, you can book a free consultation call with our security experts today.

3 Static Application Security Testing advantages (SAST) You Should Know

Thu, 20 Aug 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Application security testing is an absolute necessity today. With the evolving cybersecurity threat landscape and evolving attacks, application security testing has become a crucial aspect for organizations globally.

We have seen a significant rise in the number of both small and medium organizations fall victim to cyberattacks. Especially in Agile and DevOps environments where developers need to constantly push out better upgrades with new features and functionality, it has become difficult for security to keep pace with the rapid development.

In a survey, it was found that nearly 72% of respondents feel security is a “nag” and 48% acknowledged the importance of security testing but said they didn’t have enough time for it.

Whether you follow a continuous delivery pipeline wherein you need to regularly deliver software updates or work in a traditional software environment, security testing is not optional.

How can you do application security testing?

One essential testing method is static application security testing (SAST). It is used to identify and mitigate security vulnerabilities in software early in its development phase.

In this article, we will be exploring more about SAST and gain a deeper understanding of the SAST advantages to figure out whether it’s ideal for your business.

What is Static Application Security Testing (SAST)?

Static application security testing (SAST) is a white-box testing method designed to assess application source code, binaries, and byte code used for coding and design conditions to identify potential security vulnerabilities.

In static application security testing (SAST), the code is tested from the inside-out which means application testers have access to the source code or binaries. As its name implies, SAST is performed on static code when it is at rest i.e in a non-running state.

It is typically implemented during the coding and testing stages of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), integrating security testing into CI servers early in the development process. SAST scans the in-house code of an organization to detect any indicative security vulnerabilities that could become serious risks or threats.

Importance of SAST

Static application security testing (SAST) is a great application security testing method that has the flexibility to perform in various SDLC processes. SAST can be integrated directly into the development environment. This enables developers to monitor their code constantly.

How does static application security testing work?

With SAST, you can scan your code incrementally, so testers can run a complete scan once, and then do consecutive scans to test specific parts of the code that have been changed. This saves a lot of time and effort from both the development and the security team. It also leads to quick identification and mitigation of security vulnerabilities in the code.

When it comes to security testing, there are a lot of SAST advantages. However, let’s talk about the top three SAST advantages that organizations can gain by using static application security testing.

What are the Top SAST Advantages?

Here are the top benefits of SAST:

1. Shift Security Left

SAST helps integrate security into the early stages of the software development lifecycle. This enables security testers to detect vulnerabilities in the proprietary code in the design stage or the coding stage when they are relatively easier to mitigate.

If you leave security practices for the end, you might end up with security weaknesses in the production environment. Shifting security left helps reduce the risk and the costs associated with fixing security vulnerabilities.

SAST can help evaluate both client-side and server-side vulnerabilities. The application security testing helps to identify vulnerabilities in the source code or binaries like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, buffer overflows, and much more.

Real-time security testing allows vulnerabilities to be fixed before moving further along in the SDLC, helping prevent security issues from becoming serious risks for your end-users and your organization.

2. Ensure Secure Coding

Secure coding is crucial for all software - whether you write code that runs on websites, computers, mobile devices, or embedded systems. Poorly coded software is an easy target for attackers and can be hacked to perform malicious activities.

This could result in denial of service, loss of data, leakage of sensitive data, damage to software and systems of end-users, and even impact your organization’s brand reputation leading to further losses.

SAST helps ensure that the software uses a strong and secure code. It helps developers verify that their code is in compliance with secure coding standards (for e.g. CERT) and guidelines before they release the underlying code in the production environment.

Often, Scrum masters and product owners also leverage SAST tools to regulate secure coding standards within their development teams and organizations. This allows for a faster reduction of vulnerabilities and increased code integrity.

3. Quick and Accurate

SAST tools can scan your code thoroughly and do it at a much faster pace than humans performing manual secure code reviews. We use SAST tools to scan millions of lines of code to automatically detect security vulnerabilities and mitigate them.

At Cypress Data Defense, our security team experts ensure that security is embedded right into the code from the design phase to the final production. We know exactly how quickly developers roll out new updates and products, which means that security needs to catch pace with it as well.

We use a range of automated SAST tools that we have been working with for years and have proven excellent in terms of performance and efficiency. These automated tools monitor the code regularly so you don’t have to worry about constantly checking on the code.

Once you have the results from the automated testing, you can gain insights, derive useful analytics, and easily trace and fix vulnerabilities. In a nutshell, SAST tools help reduce the time it takes for developers to debug their source code

Final Thoughts

Now that you have a decent understanding of what SAST is and how can it benefit your organization, you need to implement it to strengthen your security. By integrating SAST into your continuous testing pipeline in an appropriate way, you can defend against potential security risks and the ever-changing security landscape.

Want to know more about security testing? You can reach out to us and our team of security experts will offer more tips about how you can integrate security into your organization and testing strategy. We also create roadmaps for organizations to help them understand their security posture better and tell them exactly what they need to do.

3 Open Source Security Risks and How to Address Them: What You Need to Know

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Open source software is very popular and makes up a significant portion of business applications. According to Synopsys, 99% of commercial databases contain at least one open source component, and nearly 75% of these codebases contain open source security vulnerabilities.

One of the major reasons why companies and developers choose to work with open source software is that it saves them from having to develop these base capabilities themselves.

Oh, and open source software is free!

Despite its advantages, open source software tends to have vulnerabilities that might impact your data and organization. In order to give you an overview of how open source security risks can impact your business, we have listed the top three open source security risks and ways to address them.

Before we dive into the article, let’s take a look at what exactly open source vulnerabilities are.

What Are Open Source Vulnerabilities?

Open source vulnerabilities are basically security risks in open source software. These are weak or vulnerable code that allows attackers to conduct malicious attacks or perform unintended actions that are not authorized.

In some cases, open source vulnerabilities can lead to cyberattacks like denial of service (DoS). It can also cause major breaches during which an attacker might get unauthorized access to sensitive information of an organization.

There are a lot of security concerns when it comes to open source software. For instance, OpenSSL is an encryption library responsible for managing highly sensitive data transmission functions by a wide variety of internet-connected software including the software that runs some of the most popular email, messaging, and web services.

You remember “Heartbleed”? Yes, that caused quite a stir! Yes, that was a critical open source vulnerability in a SSH library.

Similarly, another popular open source vulnerability was found in 2014 in Bash shell, the default command processor on many Linux distributions. It had an arbitrary command execution vulnerability that could be exploited remotely via server-side CGI scripts on web servers, and other mechanisms. This open source vulnerability is popularly known as “Shellshock.”

What are the Top 3 Open Source Security Risks?

Now that you have a fair idea about what open source security risks are, let’s explore the top three open source security risks that exist today and how you can mitigate these risks.

Software Security Risks

Open source vulnerabilities, once discovered, can be a tempting target for attackers to exploit them.

Typically, these open source vulnerabilities and the details about how to carry out the exploit are made publicly available. This enables hackers to gain all the necessary information they need to carry out an attack. Combine this with the widespread use of open source software, and you can imagine the havoc it creates when an open source vulnerability is found.

One of the major challenges organizations face while addressing open source vulnerabilities is that tracking them and their fixes aren’t as easy as one might assume.

Since these open source vulnerabilities are published across a wide variety of platforms, it becomes difficult to track them. Also, locating the updated version, patch, or fix to address the security risk is a time-consuming and expensive process.

Once an open source vulnerability and its path of exploitation are published, it’s just a matter of time until attackers exploit them and hack into your organization. It is imperative that businesses integrate necessary tools and processes to quickly address open source vulnerabilities.

Publicity of Exploits

Open source vulnerabilities are made publicly available on platforms like the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), which is accessible by anyone.

A famous example of attacks due to publicly available open source vulnerabilities was the major Equifax breach in 2017 where the credit reporting company had leaked personal information of 143 million people. This attack took place because Equifax was using a version of the open source Apache Struts framework that had high-risk vulnerabilities, and attackers used that vulnerability to their advantage.

Such attacks on open source software not only cause data leakage or loss but also impact a company’s market reputation, valuation, and customer relationships. This, in turn, can impact your customer churn rate, retention rate, sales, and revenue. Dealing with the impact of a breach caused due to open source vulnerabilities can be a lengthy, and painful process.

Licensing Compliance Risks

Open source software comes with a license that allows the source code to be used, modified, or shared under defined guidelines. However, the problem with these licenses is that most of them don’t meet the stringent OSI and SPDX definitions of open source.

In addition to that, single proprietary applications often include several open source components, and these projects are released under various license types, such as GPL, Apache License, or MIT License.

Organizations are required to comply with each individual open source license, which can be quite overwhelming. Especially with the rapid development and release cycle businesses follow along with the fact that there are nearly 200+ open source license types that exist today.

A study of 1,253 applications found that about 67% of codebases had license conflicts and 33% of codebases had unlicensed software. Non-compliance with licenses can put enterprises at the risk of legal action, impacting your operations, and financial security.

How Can You Beat These Open Source Security Risks?

Next, let’s take a closer look at the solutions to these open source security risks.

Build a Security-First Culture

Too often, developers choose to work with open source components based on the functionality and programming language they need. While functionality is important, other criteria should also be included.

For instance, each individual component of a project may offer functionality, without the need to integrate the entire project codebase. This helps limit the number of open source software and helps simplify integration, remove security risks, and reduce source code complexity as well in non-required components.

Open source software is just as likely to have security risks as any other software, so it’s necessary that each component you choose to work with offers functionality and is secure.

In addition to this, open source projects are usually focused on delivering new updates with new features for end users. Due to time and budget constraints, enterprises pay less attention to security and are more inclined to release the update as quickly as possible.

However, companies should maintain a balance between the new releases while ensuring that the design, implementation, and code is secure.

One of the most important things you can do is to inventory what open source software you use and track vulnerabilities that are associated with these libraries.

Embrace Automation and Scanning for Vulnerabilities in Open Source Software

Finding and fixing vulnerabilities in open source software is a big challenge in itself. Companies need to find a way to detect all security vulnerabilities in the open source code in their environments, update the list regularly, drive developers away from old, insecure software components, and finally deploy patches whenever security vulnerabilities are found.

One way to help combat this is to incorporate automated tools that help you continuously track your open source usage and identify security weaknesses, vulnerabilities, fixes, and updates.

Automation tools for open source software help identify which packages are being used in which projects, what security vulnerabilities they contain, and how they can be fixed. These tools often come with alerting features as well. If a vulnerability is discovered, notifications are sent to the concerned development and security team to alert them about the newly found security risks.

Integrating automation to scan security vulnerabilities in open source software is especially important for large organizations, since it can be difficult to track and identify vulnerabilities in all of their source code that is in use.

Most enterprises are not even aware of their full inventory of applications they have, which makes them more vulnerable to cyberattacks due to unidentified vulnerabilities in the source code. A report says nearly 88% of the codebases have open source components with no development activity at all in the last two years.

Cross-Train Your Staff

It’s not always easy or even possible to hire professionals who are experts in both development and security. It is, however, possible to train your teams so that they can approach the issues from both ends. While it isn’t always easy to hold regular cybersecurity awareness training for different teams, it’s critical for the overall security of your projects.

Enterprises should ensure that their developers have a general understanding of cybersecurity, as well as the latest trends and updates. Your developers should be able to identify common security issues that arise in open source code, if not fix them.

Similarly, the security team should be involved in the development process from the early stages. Rather than making security an after-thought, it should be a priority from the very beginning of a project.

Just as you analyze and track your development process, you should proactively monitor your security efforts as well. Taking a proactive approach can go a long way in being prepared to handle open source security risks.

Final Thoughts

Open source is an excellent model that can be found in many of today’s projects. However, to ensure secure open source code, you need to acknowledge the security risks that come with open source software. You have to make sure that each of your open source components is delivering value to the project and are secure.

Cypress Data Defense helps companies run security audits and strengthen the overall security of their projects by recommending the best security practices.

We help enterprises create a roadmap for releasing secure updates and provide open source support, scanning, monitoring, and provide solutions to safely and effectively leverage open source software. With Cypress Data Defense, organizations can gain necessary control over their open source components to mitigate open source security risks while increasing their cost savings.

Outsource Application Security: Should You Consider It?

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Outsourcing application security has become a popular option among organizations globally. With data breaches becoming more common, companies risk losing sensitive data that could impact their business on a large scale affecting their integrity, brand reputation, market value, and customer relationships.

Moreover, today’s applications are often connected to various networks, systems, and end-users, so it’s imperative that organizations ensure robust application security. However, with increasing customer demands and shorter release timelines, companies often struggle to maintain the security of their applications.

Who Should Consider Outsourcing Application Security?

Small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) that have limited budgets for their cybersecurity often do not have the bandwidth to adequately perform cybersecurity functions while hiring skilled but expensive security professionals.

It becomes simply too much for them to handle. Which is why outsourcing application security becomes an easy and necessary part of many businesses.

Whether you’re just starting out or have an established business and looking to scale, outsourcing security can be of great help. It not only brings down the overall expense of your projects but also improves the quality of your product and services.

A survey found that organizations are already demonstrating their inclination towards outsourcing security to help navigate the cybersecurity landscape. Nearly 14% of total respondents say they outsource more than 50% of their cybersecurity operations. On the other hand, about 65% CISOs say they outsource nearly 21% to 30% of their cybersecurity operations.

Why Should You Outsource Application Security?

If you’re wondering whether or not outsourcing application security is a good idea, here are a few reasons why you should consider it:

Availability

Today, companies are expected to continuously roll out better products and services in the market to keep pace with increasing customer demands. Often, companies rush through the development process and may overlook the importance of security when they roll out updates, which could harm a lot of their customers as well as other stakeholders.

It’s best to outsource your IT security to meet your deadlines without having to put additional pressure on your development team or risking your data.

Outsourced security experts can provide near real-time cybersecurity support. It also allows you to gain a much more granular and in-depth level of security monitoring and get insights into what your security posture looks like.

Once you have engaged with an outsourced security service team, they can be available as needed (depending on the contract) and help you with different phases of the project while maintaining security.

Industry Expertise

Outsourcing cybersecurity professionals is an excellent idea, given they have the necessary experience and skills to handle organizational data and system security. This means that you don’t have to provide them with regular training like your in-house employees, and can rely on their expertise.

Also, since these security service providers work with different businesses, they experience considerably more security vulnerabilities and threats as compared to an in-house security team member who works just within your organization.

For instance, Cypress Data Defense has worked with multiple companies around the globe and addressed tens and hundreds of different vulnerabilities including malware, trojans, phishing, BYOD, AI-powered threats, etc. We know exactly what the possible threats are and how to effectively deal with them without disrupting your routine business activities.

Affordable Cost

If you are looking to hire cybersecurity professionals full-time, you’ll find that it’s quite an expensive option. The last thing you want is to hire low-skilled or experienced workers to cut costs when it comes to cybersecurity.

Combine this with the scarcity of skilled professionals and you can imagine how much you will be paying if you want an in-house experienced security service professional working with you.

Fortunately, many security service providers offer managed services at affordable costs while taking away the hassles of hiring, administering, monitoring, and potentially even housing those employees.

Furthermore, third-party providers have the requisite resources to work with the latest tools and technologies to ensure your organization’s data is safe and secure. This can potentially help you save a lot of money.

Quality

Since managed security service providers aim for long, recurring contracts and business partnerships, they are likely to perform their work effectively and quickly.

Better quality security testing means better services, which might lead to more referrals and brand advocacy for your company. On the other hand, you have to monitor your in-house employees continuously which can be pretty daunting.

In a nutshell, while outsourcing, you can be assured that the security team has the caliber available to cater to your organization and its cybersecurity needs.

Dedicated and Skilled Security Service Providers

The cybersecurity skills shortage is plaguing the business world. In fact, a report suggests that cybersecurity talent shortage will lead to 3.5 unfulfilled positions by 2021. However, by outsourcing your cybersecurity, you have a dedicated team of expert security professionals to ensure that your organization and its data is secure.

At Cypress Data Defense, we routinely train security teams on application security; we are the security service providers for your team.

We firmly believe that there’s no one single solution that can safeguard your organization from cyberattacks, therefore, we invest a lot of time and effort into coming up with customized security solutions that are just perfect for your organization.

Focus More on Your Business

As your business grows, your needs for cybersecurity will grow as well. You may also require additional support to strengthen your cybersecurity policies and protect confidential data. This is where outsourcing cybersecurity can help as it can ease the transition process as your company expands and scales.

If your business is secure and you have outsourced your cybersecurity, you can focus more on your core business. You can leave the cybersecurity component to the outsourced security service providers, while you take care of the core operations or development phase.

Final Thoughts

Outsourcing security testing is a great idea considering you want to stay up-to-date with the latest cybersecurity practices and safeguard your organization against emerging threats. Instead of spending time and resources on identifying your needs, hiring skilled professionals, training, and monitoring them, you can simply let an experienced security team handle it all.

At Cypress Data Defense, we have become the application security team for a number of companies, and we can be your security team too.

Major DevOps Challenges and How to Address Them

Fri, 24 Jul 2020 15:04:10 GMT

The genesis of DevOps comes from the need to break down the silos and get better ownership of the delivered product and better collaboration across teams. It entails two major components of the business space - Development and Operations.

Typically, DevOps is the practice of the development and operations teams working together from the start of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and through deployment and operations.

This is done to increase the organization’s speed of delivery as well as have better ownership (and corresponding, better quality) of the final product.

DevOps enables enterprises to serve their customers in a better manner with continuous delivery and an enhanced quality of deliverables. However, with the many benefits that DevOps offers, there are also challenges that you may encounter while implementing DevOps.

Whether it is aligning the goals and priorities to promote cross-functional team collaboration or shifting older infrastructure models, DevOps poses certain challenges to enterprises.

Before your organization adopts DevOps, it is essential to understand these challenges and how you may address them.

1: Communication Issues Between Security and Development Teams

Developers and security teams chase seemingly contrasting goals.

Developers aim at pushing the software out of the delivery pipeline as fast as possible.

Security teams focus on security over speed, where delivering secure applications is their top priority. Which often means spending relatively significant amounts of time reviewing applications prior to each release.

Lack of collaboration and proper communication between the security and development teams often leads to confusion, delayed deliveries, and frustration from both teams.

DevOps advocates for the early involvement of security teams in the SDLC. However, there is friction between the development and security teams in the beginning stage as the developers are frequently not aware of security principles nor how to address security threats. Development teams want to quickly spin up new servers and security teams want to slow down and ensure each server is sufficiently hardened, has proper logging in place, and so forth.

While delivering high-quality services is one of the top priorities of DevOps, it also calls for enhanced security measures.

Often, security teams do not communicate properly with the development team, leaving them oblivious of the proper security actions that need to be taken. Similarly, security teams oftentimes don’t embrace the automated nature of the DevOps approach.

2: The Difficult of the Security Team Keeping Pace with the DevOps Cycle

DevOps focuses on fast delivery speed and short development cycles. Security teams seek to be very thorough in reviewing the security of the applications and their environments, for it frequently takes just one vulnerability to severely compromise an organization.

With this need to be thorough, it can take a much longer time to assess the code and its environment than it takes to develop or modify it.

While DevOps aims for rapid continuous delivery, organizations are often pushed to leave out security for the sake of speedy deliveries. Putting speed first allows misconfigurations, potential bugs, unaddressed threats, and vulnerabilities in the application, exposing it to security breaches and malicious attacks.

3: Cultural Resistance to Security

Traditionally, security testing occurred towards the end of the SDLC, right before the deployment phase. But with DevOps, security teams are integrated throughout the SDLC.

This early integration can lead to strife as the development teams are accustomed to working quickly on their own during the development stage of the lifecycle.

Development teams experience immense pressure from management to deliver development updates as fast as possible and frequently view any interaction with the security team during development as a hindrance to delivering functionality that management desires.

While the development team works towards this goal, the security of the application is often sacrificed in the fast-paced process. Many believe that integrating security early in the process can produce delayed deliveries and hence they avoid the security aspect of an application.

This is oftentimes a cultural issue, especially if the security team is viewed as the “naysayers” who continually say you can’t do something rather than saying how you can do something securely.

If the security team has developed a reputation as a “naysayer,” then it can be difficult to overcome that and build a close collaborative relationship in the DevOps environment.

4: Avoiding Risks Related to Containers and Other Tools

A DevOps environment frequently relies on cloud infrastructure and deployments, which often leaves the application exposed to potential security threats if proper measures are not put into place. Many open-source, immature, and new tools are used in the DevOps environment.

In the fast-paced delivery pipeline of DevOps, a simple bug or misconfiguration can lead to spectacular failures (such as organizations publicly exposing their administration consoles for their orchestration software like Tesla did).

A DevOps team will utilize various tools such as Ansible, Salt, Chef, Puppet, etc. along with many others. One of the most commonly utilized tools/technologies used by DevOps teams are containers.

Containers are ultra-lightweight portable packaging platforms that make it simple to deploy applications. Unfortunately, it can be difficult for security teams to assess the security of these containers.

Are safe libraries being used, are properly hardened services being spun up? Are secrets being securely stored and managed?

Frequently, these questions are not fully addressed and answered and the use of containers may introduce new risks into an organization.

But the issue isn’t just with containers, all of the tools associated with deployment need to be addressed and secured, since they are instrumental in creating the deployed application and environment.

All too often, the keys of the kingdom are associated with orchestration software and these need to be carefully scrutinized to ensure that they are secure.

5: Poor Access Controls and Secrets Management

With highly automated builds and deployments, secrets management and tight access controls are essential.

Secrets may include API tokens, SSH Keys, privileged account credentials, etc. These might be used by containers, services, employees and many more entities. All too frequently, these critical passwords and keys are poorly managed (exposed) and are frequent targets of attackers.

Additionally, to ensure a smooth and quick workflow, DevOps teams often allow almost unrestricted access to privileged accounts such as admin, root, etc.

When multiple individuals use and share credentials of confidential accounts, and when processes run with elevated privileges, the possibility of these excessive permissions being abused increases significantly.

Best Practices to Address These Challenges

While DevOps may give rise to some security vulnerabilities and pose compatibility issues between various teams in the SDLC, there are ways to tackle these challenges.

To strengthen DevOps security, while maintaining a balance between different teams, and the need for agility, consider implementing the following practices in your organization.

1: Enforce Security-Focused Policies

The implementation of governance and effective communication is crucial in building holistic security environments.

You should define a concise, easy to understand, and transparent set of cybersecurity procedures and policies for areas such as access controls, code review, firewalls, and configuration management.

The DevOps teams should adhere to these security policies, and work together collaboratively towards a secured application.

Additionally, the concept of “infrastructure as code (IaC)”, is a cornerstone of DevOps.

IaC is the definition of the setup and configuration of virtual machines, networks, load balancers, and connection topology as code that uses the same versioning as the DevOps teams use for its application code.

While this may seem scary, it can be extremely powerful, as code (the infrastructure, the servers, routers, the configurations, etc.) can be reviewed and assessed easier to ensure that the environment is in the correct hardened configuration.

Similar to the principle where the same code generates the same binary, an IaC model also generates the same environment when it is applied.

Do you want to ensure that you have the server in the correct configuration? Easy. Deploy a new server from the approved version with the hardened configuration that is stored as code.

IaC solves the problem of environment drift in the delivery pipeline. Without IaC, teams have to maintain the settings of each deployment environment.

Inconsistency between different environments can lead to issues in the release phase. With the integration of IaC, DevOps teams can easily administer and manage the security of their applications and environments.

DevOps teams that integrate IaC work together with a unified set of security practices and tools to support infrastructure and deliver applications reliably, rapidly, and at scale.

2: Adopt a DevSecOps Model

Effective DevOps security can be achieved by encouraging cross-functional collaborations throughout the entire DevOps lifecycle. DevOps teams should not just work in-sync but also actively participate in the development lifecycle to achieve common goals of enhanced security.

Security should not be the sole responsibility of one team, instead, it should be a culture deep-rooted within the organization. When security is culturally imbued throughout an enterprise, it is known as “DevSecOps.”

It is a culture within organizations where everyone takes responsibility for adhering to security practices.

DevSecOps consists of cybersecurity functions and governance to reduce the possibility of security breaches via loose account controls and other security vulnerabilities. It goes way beyond technical tools and software, ensuring that security is a core principle of the organization.

DevSecOps encourages various teams to learn about basic security principles. All members of a team should have some core security training.

In addition to training, developers should learn how to use automated tools and software to run quick security checks. Security professionals should also be able to write code and work with APIs so that they can script and automate security checks, especially with regards to IaC.

Security teams can get involved and develop approved and hardened versions of the infrastructure for the development team to use. They can also enforce the configurations by monitoring the infrastructure code through automated means.

3: Use Automation for Speed and Scalability

Automation plays a crucial role when it comes to creating secure applications and secure environments. Automation helps mitigate the risks arising from manual errors and reduces the associated vulnerabilities and downtime.

Without automated security tools and processes, it becomes difficult for the security team to keep pace with the DevOps team. Automated tools can be used for several processes such as configuration management, vulnerability management, privileged credentials/secrets management, and code analysis among others.

Along with implementing automated tools and processes in your DevOps, another thing that’s critical is the selection of automated tools and processes.

Automated tools used for creating a secure DevOps workflow should:

Be easy to understand and manage
Not require security expertise
Not give a high false-positive rate of issues
Be integrated into the CI/CD pipeline

The goal is to help the DevOps team work efficiently and in an easier manner, not to overload them with dozens of tools or alien processes from their working environment.

The smaller the gap between the speed of the security and the DevOps team, the easier it will be to embed security as a core principle in your organization.

4: Manage Vulnerabilities Effectively

Incorporating security at the beginning phase of the SDLC helps facilitate the early detection of bugs and vulnerabilities.

With these identified vulnerabilities, you will need an efficient vulnerability management system so that you can track and prioritize how each vulnerability should be addressed (remediation, acceptance, transfer, etc).

There are 4 primary stages to a vulnerability management program:

Determine the criticality of an asset, owners of the assets, frequency of scanning, and establish achievable timeline for remediation.
Discover and inventory assets on the network.
Identify vulnerabilities on the discovered assets.
Report and remediate the identified vulnerabilities.

While you work with a vulnerability management program, you may notice a fairly high vulnerability score with time consuming remediation cycles in the beginning. However, the key is to show progress quarter by quarter, and year by year.

As teams become more familiar and educated about the vulnerability management program, the time for remediation and vulnerability scores should eventually decrease.

The most successful vulnerability management programs continuously adopt and comply with the latest risk reduction goals of the cybersecurity guidelines and policies within the organization.

5: Adopt Effective DevOps Secrets Management

Secrets are passwords, keys, and other sensitive information that must be carefully controlled.

With the move towards fast automated deployment, DevOps teams have frequently resorted to very poor secrets management, such as storing passwords in files in containers.

In the race for fast automated deployments, teams can oftentimes take shortcuts that leave very sensitive passwords and keys exposed.

For effective DevOps secrets management, you should remove confidential data such as credentials from the code, files, accounts, services and in various platforms and tools.

This involves eliminating the passwords from the code and storing them in a centralized password safe when not in use.

You can use products like Cyberark, Azure key vault, AWS secrets manager, Thycotic Secret Server, and others to store your passwords when not using them.

Privileged password management solutions will ensure that scripts and applications request use of the password from a centralized password safe. Additionally, by implementing APIs in the system, you can gain control over code, scripts, files, and embedded keys.

6: Adopt Effective Privileged Access Management

Restricting privileged access to accounts can significantly reduce the opportunities and risks for internal as well as external attackers to exploit the system. Technically, this means eliminating access to administrative or privileged accounts on end-user machines.

You should monitor every privileged account session to ensure that they are legitimate and adhere to compliance mandates.

Enforcing a restrictive privileged model also consists of limited access for developers and testers to certain development, production, and management systems.

But it should still allow them appropriate access and permissions to build images and machines from approved templates, and deploy, modify, and remediate vulnerability issues in the system.

Consider implementing a cutting-edge privileged access management solution such as OpenIAM that can automate the control, monitoring, and auditing of privileged access throughout the development lifecycle.

It should also be capable of tracking the full lifecycle of privileged credentials/secrets management.

Takeaways

DevOps has propelled organizations towards a better future by providing efficient solutions that aid in faster delivery, encourage collaboration between teams, and foster an Agile environment.

While DevOps offers ample benefits, it also introduces challenges. One of the most prominent issues with DevOps is the difficulty many organizations face integrating security into the DevOps process.

But security must be integrated. Early and effective implementation of security in DevOps can help identify vulnerabilities quickly and remediate operational weaknesses before they become an issue.

By integrating security early in the DevOps lifecycle, you can ensure that it is embedded at the very core of the system and runs throughout the lifecycle of the product. It will secure the code from the risks of data breaches and cybersecurity attacks that exploit weaknesses in the system.

To learn more about Secure DevOps, please visit our blog where we write extensively about DevOps, security training, Agile, and SDLC secure methodologies.

If you want to run a quick scan on your products and test them against possible threats and weaknesses, feel free to explore our services and book an appointment right away!

7 Mobile App Security Risks and How to Mitigate Them

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Mobile app security is a moving target. The need for better functionalities and features along with rapid deployment of software updates often comes at the expense of mobile security.

One of the major concerns for mobile app development is the rising mobile app security risks, particularly to prevent data breaches.

According to a study, over 10,573 malicious mobile apps were blocked per day in 2018.

As technology advances, it has not only become easier to build and deploy apps, but also easy to crack a mobile application’s security as developers are still writing insecure code.

Some attackers might try to crack a mobile app to find out more about the special features and other information about your mobile application. Others might do it to breach backend services.

But how do you avoid such mobile security threats?

Let’s find out.

Top 7 Mobile App Security Risks and Ways to Mitigate Them

Here are the top mobile app security risks and ways to mitigate them:

1. Insecure Communication

In a common mobile app, data is typically exchanged in a client-server fashion. When the application transmits data, it traverses through the internet and the mobile device’s carrier network.

Attackers might exploit mobile security vulnerabilities to intercept sensitive information or user data while it is traversing across the network.

What are the threat agents that exist in insecure communication?

Malware on your mobile device
A malicious actor who shares your local network (monitored or compromised wifi)
Carrier or network devices (proxies, cell towers, routers, etc.)

Mobile developers often use SSl/TLS only during authentication but not elsewhere. This leads to an inconsistent security layer which increases the risk of exposing sensitive data such as credentials, personal information, session IDs, and more to interception by attackers.

Having a SSL/TLS does not imply that the mobile application is entirely secure. You need to implement strong security protocols throughout the mobile application and its network.

#How Can You Prevent Insecure Communication?

Only establish a secure connection after authenticating the identity of the endpoint server. While applying SSL/TLS to your mobile application, make sure you implement it on the transport channels that the mobile app will use to transverse sensitive data such as session tokens, credentials, etc.

Use strong, industry standard cipher suites with appropriate key lengths. Apart from this, also consider using certificates signed by a trusted CA provider and refrain from allowing self-signed certificates. You should also consider certificate pinning for sensitive applications.

Remember to account for third-parties like social networks as well by using their TLS versions when a mobile application runs a routine using webkit/browser.

Consider applying an additional layer of encryption to any sensitive data before it is even given to the SSL channel. If security vulnerabilities are found in the SSL implementation, the encryption layer will act as a secondary defense against attacks.

2. Lack of Input Validation

Input validation is the process of assessing input data to ensure that it is properly formed, preventing malformed data that might consist of harmful code or may trigger malfunction in the mobile app.

What is the impact of poor input validation in mobile apps?

Why is it a mobile security threat? Here’s why:

When the mobile application does not validate input properly, it puts the application at risk of exposure to attackers who might be able to inject malicious data input and gain access to sensitive data in the app or breach backend data stores.

Ideally, input validation should occur instantly after the data is received from an external system. This includes data from third-party vendors, partners, regulators, or suppliers, each of which could be compromised to deliver malformed data.

While input validation is not sufficient to be used as a primary defense against preventing mobile app security risks, it is a significant way to filter out malicious data if implemented properly.

#How Can You Prevent Weak Input Validation?

You can implement input validation by using programming techniques that facilitate the effective enforcement of data correctness such as:

Minimum and maximum value range check for dates and numerical parameters along with length check of strings
Input validation against XML Schema and JSON Scheme
Minimum and maximum value range check for strings, minimum and maximum length check for dates and numerical parameters.
Regular expressions for any other structured data covering the entire input string (^...$) and avoiding using "any character" wildcard (e.g. as . or \S)
Array of permitted values for small sets of string parameters (e.g. hours of days)

Alternatively, a more efficient way to prevent attacks caused by poor input validation is to only allow known good rather than only rejecting known bad. This can set up much more stringent controls if done properly.

If the input data is structured like social security numbers, dates, email addresses, zip codes, etc, then the mobile app developer should be able to build and implement a strong input data validation pattern on the basis of regular expressions.

However, if the input data comes in a fixed set of options, such as radio buttons or drop down list, then the input data should match exactly as one of the options available to the user from the mobile application.

3. Insecure Data Storage

Insecure data storage can occur in many different places within your mobile app such as binary data stores, SQL databases, cookies stores, and more. The vulnerability in using an insecure data storage is if you use one, it could be compromised due to issues with jailbroken devices, frameworks, or other attacks.

Attackers can easily circumvent the security protocols of a mobile app if not implemented correctly, such as poor encryption libraries that can be bypassed by jailbreaking or rooting the mobile device.

If an attacker gains access to a database or device, they can modify the legitimate app to extract information to their systems.

What is the impact of insecure data storage?

Insecure data storage may result in the following:
Intellectual property (IP) loss
Identity theft
Fraud
Privacy violations
Reputation damage

Many times, insecure data storage also occurs due to a lack of processes to handle the cache of key presses, images, and data.

#How Can You Prevent Insecure Data Storage?

Avoid the “MODE WORLD READABLE” or “MODE WORLD WRITABLE” modes for IPC files as they do not offer the ability to control data format or limit data access to specific applications.

However, if you want to share data with other app processes, consider using a content provider which provides specific read and write permissions to other apps with dynamic permission access on a case-by-case basis.

Also, consider encrypting local files that contain sensitive data using the security library. Further, reduce the number of permissions that your app requests. By limiting access to sensitive data permissions, you can significantly reduce the risk of exploitation of those permissions, making your mobile app much less vulnerable to attackers.

When it comes to iOS, it provides secure storage APIs which enables mobile app developers to use cryptographic hardware available on every iOS device. Developers can also utilize the iOS data security APIs to work with fine grained access control for user data stored in flash memory.

4. Client Code Security

Code security issues are quite common in mobile apps.

Many of these issues can take extensive time to detect using manual code reviews, you can leverage automated, third-party tools to perform fuzzing or static analysis. These tools can identify injection issues, insecure data storage, weak encryption, and other security issues.

However, automated tools are not sufficient on their own, you still need manual review to find security threats where automation fails.

#How Can You Prevent Poor Code Quality Issues?

Maintain consistent secure coding practices that do not lead to vulnerable code. When using buffers, make sure you validate that the length of the incoming buffer data does not exceed the length of the target buffer.

Use automation to detect memory leaks and buffer overflows via third-party static analysis tools. Also ensure that you prioritize solving issues like memory leaks and buffer overflows over other code quality issues as they tend to give rise to more mobile security risks and can be easily exploited.

Use a security company that specializes in static analysis to review your code and identify these security threats and vulnerabilities.

5. Insufficient Authentication and Authorization Controls

Missing or poor authentication schemes allow attackers to anonymously execute functionalities within the mobile application or the backend server used by the app.

Authentication requirements in mobile apps can be different from traditional web applications, in the terms that in mobile apps, users are not needed to be online at all times during their session.

It’s possible that mobile apps may have uptime requirements that need offline authentication. This method of offline authenticating a user’s identity can pose security risks that developers should consider while implementing authentication schemes.

Similarly, poor authorization can also impact the security of a mobile app depending on the nature of high-privileges breached to attack a mobile user. For instance, if an attacker is able to execute high-privilege actions, such as those of administrators, it may result in data theft, modification, or complete compromise of backend services.

#How Can You Prevent Poor Authentication and Authorization?

There are several ways you can implement proper authentication and authorization for increased mobile security:

Ensure that authentication requests are performed on the server side. Upon successful authentication, the data should be loaded into the mobile device. This will ensure that data is only loaded after successful authentication.
If client-side data storage is required, use encryption to protect your data and securely derive from the user’s credentials.
To implement strong authorization schemes, verify the roles and permissions of authenticated users using only data contained in backend systems.
Use multi-factor authentication to validate a user’s identity. You can use one-time passwords, security questions, etc.

6. Poor Encryption

Encryption is the process of converting data into an encrypted form that is only readable after it has been translated back using a secret decryption key. If devices and data are not encrypted properly, then attackers can much more readily access the data.

What is the impact of poor encryption?

Simply, poor encryption can lead to data loss and all of the repercussions that follow from that loss of information.

Where do developers screw up encryption?

Many times, developers implement strong encryption, however if the keys are not properly handled, even the best encryption algorithms can fail. For instance, including the keys in insecure databases or files that are easily readable by other users.

This is one of the most common failures we see. Attackers don’t try to break the encryption algorithm, that’s too hard; they go after the keys. Unfortunately, insecure key management is a huge issue.

Another way mobile developers mishandle encryption is by creating and using custom encryption algorithms or protocols. Often these encryption algorithms are not as secure as other modern algorithms available in the security community. Additionally, using weak or insecure encryption algorithms such as RC2, MD5, MD4, and SHA1 can also lead to attacks.

#How Can You Prevent Poor Encryption Algorithms?

Make sure you implement modern encryption algorithms that are accepted as strong by the security community. Use the encryption APIs available within your mobile platform.

Consider implementing encryption in layers so that even if the attacker gets the decryption key to decrypt one layer, there’s another two layers of encryption they need to break into. Also, make sure you store encryption keys securely. This is critical.

7. Reverse Engineering

If an attacker can read your code, they can find better ways to attack your application.

Reverse engineering can be used to determine how the app functions on the back end, modify the source code, expose encryption algorithms in place, and more. So the code you developed for your mobile app can be used against you and pose severe security risks.

#How Can You Prevent Reverse Engineering?

An effective way of preventing mobile apps from reverse engineering is to limit the capabilities client side and expose more functionality through web services server side. Once functionality is limited to the bare minimum needed, then you obfuscate that code base using commercial obfuscators.

Also, avoid storing API keys in shared resource folders, assets, or anywhere else that’s easily accessible by an outsider. Use either public/private key exchange or NDK to protect your mobile app’s API key.

Final Thoughts

It is not possible to learn about all of the mobile app security risks that exist. But with the help of the above information about the most common mobile app security risks, you can secure your mobile apps from the biggest security threats.

For more information about mobile app security, you can reach out to us and our security experts can help you build a secure mobile app.

7 Cloud Computing Security Vulnerabilities and What to Do About Them

Thu, 09 Jul 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Companies are rapidly using the cloud to revolutionize their digital transformations. According to Gartner, the global market for cloud computing is estimated to grow $266.4 billion by 2020, rising from $227.4 billion in 2019.

There are several benefits of cloud computing including potential lower cost (with more capabilities in the public cloud that could aid productivity versus more limited capabilities in private clouds) and faster time to market.

However, with the array of benefits that the cloud offers, data security is amongst the key concerns holding back enterprises from adopting cloud solutions. To back this up, a survey found that 93% of companies are moderately to extremely concerned about cloud computing security risks.

Cloud infrastructure can be complex, and we all know that complexity is the enemy of security. While most cloud security experts agree that companies can benefit from the security solutions built into the cloud, organizations can also make grave errors and expose critical data and systems.

Some of the most common cloud security risks include unauthorized access through improper access controls and the misuse of employee credentials.

One of the most prominent examples of this is when attackers obtained credentials and accessed Uber’s cloud servers in 2016. The hackers had got access to sensitive data of users and as a result, more than 57 million user accounts and driver accounts were compromised.

How can companies gain the benefits of cloud computing technology while still maintaining data security?

There are several preventive measures that companies can adopt to prevent cloud security vulnerabilities in their early stages. This ranges from simple cloud security solutions such as implementing multi-factor authentication to more complex security controls for compliance with regulatory mandates.

Top 7 Cloud Computing Security Vulnerabilities and Ways to Mitigate Them

In this article, we will take a comprehensive look at the top 7 cloud computing security vulnerabilities and how to mitigate them.

1. Misconfigured Cloud Storage

Cloud storage is a rich source of stolen data for cybercriminals. Despite the high stakes, organizations continue to make the mistake of misconfiguration of cloud storage which has cost many companies greatly.

According to a report by Symantec, nearly 70 million records were stolen or leaked in 2018 due to misconfigured cloud storage buckets. The report also highlighted the emergence of various tools that allow attackers to detect misconfigured cloud storage to target.

Cloud storage misconfiguration can quickly escalate into a major cloud security breach for an organization and its customers. There are several types of cloud misconfigurations that enterprises encounter. Some types of misconfigurations include:

AWS security group misconfiguration: AWS security groups are responsible for providing security at the source, destination, port and protocol access levels. These can be associated with EC2 server instances and many other resources. A misconfiguration in the AWS security groups can allow an attacker to access your cloud-based servers and exfiltrate data.
Lack of access restrictions: Inadequate restrictions or safeguards in place to prevent unauthorized access to your cloud infrastructure can put your enterprise at risk. Insecure cloud storage buckets can result in attackers gaining access to data stored in the cloud and downloading confidential data, which can have devastating consequences for your organization. AWS initially had S3 buckets open by default and this led to a plethora of data breaches.

#How to Prevent Misconfigured Cloud Storage

When it comes to cloud computing, it’s always a good idea to double-check cloud storage security configurations upon setting up a cloud server. While this may seem obvious, it can easily get overlooked by other activities such as moving data into the cloud without paying attention to its safety.

You can also use specialized tools to check cloud storage security configurations. These cloud security tools can help you check the state of security configurations on a schedule and identify vulnerabilities before it's too late.

Control who can create and configure cloud resources. Many cloud computing issues have come from people who want to move into the cloud without understanding how to secure their data.

2. Insecure APIs

Application user interfaces (APIs) are intended to streamline cloud computing processes. However, if left insecure, APIs can open lines of communications for attackers to exploit cloud resources.

Gartner estimates that by 2022, APIs will be the threat vector used more frequently by attackers to target enterprise application data.

A recent study also revealed that two-thirds of enterprises expose their APIs to the public so that external developers and business partners can access software platforms.

The study also indicated that an organization typically handles an average of 363 APIs, and nearly 61% of companies reported their business strategies rely on API integration.

With increasing dependence on APIs, attackers have found common ways to exploit insecure APIs for malicious activities, two examples follow:

Inadequate authentication: Often developers create APIs without proper authentication controls. As a result, these APIs are completely open to the internet and anyone can use them to access enterprise data and systems.
Insufficient authorization: Too many developers do not think attackers will see backend API calls and don’t put appropriate authorization controls in place. If this is not done, compromise of backend data is trivial.

#How to Prevent Insecure APIs

Encourage developers to design APIs with strong authentication, encryption, activity monitoring, and access control. APIs must be secured.

Conduct penetration tests that replicate an external attack targeting your API endpoints and get a secure code review as well. It is best to ensure you have a secure software development lifecycle (SDLC) to ensure you continually develop secure applications and APIs.

Also, consider using SSL/TLS encryption for data-in-transit. Implement multi-factor authentication with schemas such as one-time passwords, digital identities, etc. to ensure strong authentication controls.

3. Loss or Theft of Intellectual Property

Intellectual property (IP) is undeniably one of the most valuable assets of an organization, and it is also vulnerable to security threats, especially if the data is stored online.

An analysis found that almost 21% of files uploaded to cloud-based file-sharing services contain sensitive information including IP. When these cloud services are breached, attackers can gain access to sensitive information stored in them.

For many organizations, the IP is the data they own and data loss means they lose their IP. Let’s take a look at the most common causes of data loss:

Data alteration: When data is altered in a way and it cannot be restored to its previous state, it can result in loss of complete data integrity and might render it useless.
Data deletion: An attacker could delete sensitive data from a cloud service which obviously poses a severe data security threat to an organization’s operations.
Loss of access: Attackers can hold information for ransom (ransomware attack) or encrypt data with strong encryption keys until they execute their malicious activities.

Therefore, it’s essential to take preventive measures to safeguard your intellectual property and data in a cloud environment.

#How to Prevent Loss or Theft of Intellectual Property

Frequent backups are one of the most effective ways to prevent loss or theft of intellectual property. Set a schedule for regular backups and clear delineation of what data is eligible for backups and what is not. Consider using data loss prevention (DLP) software to detect and prevent unauthorized movement of sensitive data.

Another solution to prevent loss or theft of data is to encrypt your data and geo-diversify your backups. Having offline backups is also very important, especially with ransomware.

4. Compliance Violations and Regulatory Actions

Enterprises must have steadfast rules to determine who can access which data and what they can do with it.

While the cloud offers the benefit of ease of access, it also poses a security risk as it can be difficult to keep track of who can access the information in the cloud. Under compliance or industry regulations, it is important for organizations to know the details about their data storage and access control.

Moving your applications to the public cloud certainly doesn’t guarantee regulatory compliance and usually makes compliance more difficult. The “shared responsibility model” offered by service providers means they own the cloud security, you must maintain your data security in the cloud.

Privacy mandates such as CCPA, PCI-DSS, and GDPR all apply to cloud computing and if your company manages a lot of sensitive data such as PII (personally identifiable information), moving to cloud computing could make compliance more of an issue.

#How to Prevent Compliance Violations and Regulatory Actions

The first and foremost step for compliance in the cloud is to thoroughly analyze the cloud service agreement and ask for cloud and data security policies from your service provider.

It’s worth noting that the responsibilities for maintaining cloud security will depend on the cloud service level, whether it is infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or software as a service (SaaS). This will influence the security and ownership responsibility for both your cloud provider and organization.

Make sure you implement a model for access management where you can see the record of what systems are deployed and their cloud security levels. Here are some quick tips:

Know all of your users, roles, and access permissions.
Have a clear identity and be able to track all assets across all geographic locations and control what data can be where.
Maintain strong configuration management with frequent and automated scanning of templates.

Implement an incident response plan for violations related to cloud computing. This way, you can quickly identify and mitigate security vulnerabilities in case a cloud data breach occurs, or a vulnerability is exposed to attackers. The response strategy should be well documented and approved within your organization’s overall incident response plan.

5. Loss of Control Over End-User Actions

When companies are not aware of how their employees are using cloud computing services, they could lose control of their data assets and ultimately become vulnerable to breaches and insider security threats.

Insiders don’t have to break through virtual private networks (VPNs), firewalls, or other security defenses to gain access to the internal data in the cloud of an enterprise. They can directly access sensitive data in the cloud infrastructure without much hassle.

This can lead to the loss of intellectual property and proprietary information which has clear implications for the organization.

Dealing with loss of control over end-user actions requires surveillance, monitoring, escalation, post-incidence analysis, remediation, investigation, and incident response, all of which should be integrated into the company’s data security plan.

#How to Prevent Loss of Control Over End-User Actions

Provide training to your employees to teach them how to handle security vulnerabilities, such as phishing and malware. Educate them about cloud computing and how to protect confidential information they carry outside the organization on their mobile devices or laptops. Inform them of the repercussions related to malicious activities.

Routinely audit servers in the cloud infrastructure to identify data security vulnerabilities that could be exploited and fix them in a timely manner.

Focus on approved hardened images that are scanned routinely for security risks and vulnerabilities. Then deploy new servers from these images and continually scan for proper configuration and to detect vulnerabilities. Focus on "cattle not pets". If a server is vulnerable or out of compliance, don't repair it, replace it with an approved hardened image.

Ensure that privileged central servers and access security systems are limited to a minimum number of people, and that those employees have adequate training to securely handle their administrative rights in the cloud server.

6. Poor Access Management

Improper access management is perhaps the most common cloud computing security risk. In breaches involving web applications, stolen or lost credentials have been the most widely used tool by attackers for several years.

Access management ensures that individuals can perform only the tasks they need to perform. The process of verifying what an individual has access to is known as authorization.

In addition to standard access management issues plaguing organizations today, such as managing a distributed workforce and user password fatigue, there are several other cloud-specific challenges that organizations face, including the following:

Inactive assigned users
Multiple administrator accounts
Improper user and service provisioning and deprovisioning - for instance, companies not revoking access permissions of former employees
Users bypassing enterprise access management controls

Furthermore, the creation of roles and management of access privileges within the cloud infrastructure can also be challenging for enterprises.

#How to Prevent Poor Access Management

To combat poor access management in cloud services, enterprises need to develop a data governance framework for user accounts. For all human users, accounts should be linked directly to the central directory services, such as Active Directory, which is responsible for provisioning, monitoring, and revoking access privileges from a centralized store.

Additionally, enterprises should use cloud-native or third-party tools to regularly pull lists of roles, privileges, users, and groups from cloud service environments. AWS Command Line Interface and PowerShell for Azure can collect this type of data, and then the security team can sort, store, and analyze it.

Organizations should also ensure logging and event monitoring mechanisms are in place in cloud environments to detect unusual activity or unauthorized changes. Access keys should be tightly controlled and managed to avoid poor data handling or leakage.

7. Contractual Breaches with Customers or Business Partners

Contracts in cloud computing are somewhat tricky. It often restricts who is authorized to access the data, how it can be used, and where and how it can be stored. When employees move restricted data into the cloud without authorization, the business contracts may be violated and legal action could ensue.

For instance, if your cloud service provider maintains the right to share all data uploaded to the cloud with third parties under their terms and conditions, they are breaching a confidentiality agreement with your company.

This could lead to leakage of data from your customers, employees, and other stakeholders that may have been uploaded to the cloud.

How to Prevent Contractual Breaches with Customers or Business Partners

The cloud service contract should include the rights to review, monitor, and audit reports. This way, any security risk can be identified at an early stage before it becomes an issue. Companies should also ensure that they are not locked into a service contract and switching vendors can be a smooth exercise.

This means that the service contract should include service termination rights for the business (for example, change of control, service deterioration, regulatory requirements, security/confidentiality beach, etc.)

The service contract should also highlight the intellectual property risk, as cloud services may include the use of IP or other software rights under a license agreement. The organization could then be dragged into a legal dispute if a third party claims infringement against the cloud service provider.

Final Thoughts

Companies operating in the cloud are taking a preventable yet big risk if they are not looking at mitigating the risks that come with it. Businesses must have strong cloud security policies that can be well integrated into the IT processes that teams use to build applications and deploy in the cloud infrastructure.

The adoption of cloud computing has transformed the way both companies and hackers work. It has brought a gamut of opportunities as well as a whole new set of cloud security risks. Enterprises need to continuously address cloud security risks and challenges while adopting the right security tools to help make the operational work easier.

Cypress Data Defense’s cloud security solution integrates the latest security technologies with your cloud infrastructure. With the right technology, cloud security experts, and forethought, companies can leverage the benefits of cloud computing.

7 Top Benefits of Outsourcing Security Services

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 15:04:10 GMT

It’s a tough world for businesses right now. You have the added responsibility of protecting yourself and your customers from cybersecurity threats and attacks while maintaining a perfect IT infrastructure.

According to a report, in the first half of 2019, data breaches exposed over 4.1 billion records. The continuously rising number of cyberattacks are a major concern for business owners worldwide.

The cybersecurity threat landscape is evolving at a much more rapid pace than organizations are prepared for and attackers continue to target vulnerable organizations with weak cybersecurity infrastructures.

Having an in-house IT security team is a luxury not all businesses can count on or afford because talented professionals are hard to find and expensive. This is one of the major reasons why small and mid-sized companies often opt to outsource their security services.

Let’s take a look at how outsourcing security services can offer many benefits to organizations and boost efficiency.

Risks of Cyberattacks and Security

Attackers are leveraging state-of-the-art technologies to create smarter and more difficult-to-trace methods to infiltrate a company’s network security and gain unauthorized access to their sensitive data.

This sensitive information could be customer databases, personal information, credit card info, credentials, client data, financial information, employee records, confidential contracts, or intellectual property (IP).

While it’s necessary to implement and maintain strong security frameworks throughout your organization, it’s not an easy task, especially for SMBs. As soon as organizations identify and mitigate a security vulnerability in their system for a potential security breach, another one crops up leaving the business vulnerable to a cyberattack.

Apart from this, security management in a company is a time and money-intensive process. Be it hiring the right people, or buying the latest security tools to safeguard your organization against potential threats, handling security risks is a difficult task for SMBs, particularly because they usually can’t shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars on security alone.

How can SMBs protect their organizations?

A great option SMBs might want to consider is outsourcing some of their cybersecurity services. Not only will this take the pressure and stress off of their business but also provide many other benefits too.

7 Benefits of Outsourcing Security Services

Here are some of the benefits of outsourcing security services for your company:

1. Diversified Experience & Layered Security Best Practices

Security service support comes with years of experience, knowledge, and an extensive set of tools to monitor security threats, regularly update systems, and mitigate vulnerabilities at an affordable price.

Professional security services help you maintain the right security layers including automated software patching, DNS security, firewalls, anti-malware, anti-phishing software, password managers, identify and access management (IAM) tools, and more to reduce the risk of exposing data to unauthorized users.

Having diversified and certified experience, outsourced security professionals have seen a lot more security vulnerabilities that can possibly exist in a system than your in-house security team.

In a nutshell, the biggest benefit is that they bring in more experience. So, they’re likely to be more vigilant and responsive to security issues that can crop up in the future.

2. Cost

Training and maintaining an effective security team in-house can be time-consuming and costly. Additionally, investing in state-of-the-art security hardware and software can also lead to a lot of added expenses.

Outsourcing security services allows you to access highly skilled professionals empowered with the latest technology to maintain security in your organization. That too without breaking the bank! These service providers can spread the costs of these tools and hardware across multiple customers, reducing your overall expenditures for the same level of service.

Right from the costs of risk analysis, threat modeling, security applications, appliances, and equipment, outsourcing security services proves to be a much more cost-efficient method than in-house security solutions.

This also allows you to reallocate budget resources elsewhere in the business, so it’s truly a win-win situation. Moreover, outsourcing security converts fixed IT budgets into variable costs and enables you to budget more efficiently.

In simple terms, you only pay for what you use and when you need it. Unlike with in-house security where you have to maintain and pay the costs even during downtime.

3. Level the Playing Field

Most small and small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) can’t afford to match the level of security with in-house support services in larger corporations.

Outsourcing security management can help small companies level the playing field in business by accessing top-notch security technology, and expertise that large corporates enjoy.

The best part about outsourcing security services is that you don’t even have to invest millions exclusively for all of these tools and technology.

Typically, outsourcing services come in a cost-effective package and an economy of scale can give your organization a significant advantage. Then you can focus on other aspects of your company without having to worry about maintaining security levels with your competitors.

4. Reduce Risk

Maintaining security in a company isn’t a cakewalk. It entails multiple aspects of risk, such as competition, government regulations, markets, financial conditions, changing technology, etc.

Outsourcing security providers manage most of the business risk that comes for you, with specific industry knowledge and expertise, especially about compliance and regulatory issues.

Managed IT support also reduces the chances of security breaches significantly. Outsourcing providers build customized risk management strategies that are apt for your business model and needs. They evaluate all risk areas and determine a plan to follow in the event of security breaches, which helps reduce downtime and costs by a significant margin.

Outsourcing providers also focus on maintaining regular backups to prevent data loss and help you implement the best security practices to meet your needs.

5. Scalability

It’s certainly impractical to expect your development team to handle all security vulnerabilities, or hiring a team of security professionals for one project and then training those individuals to perform their tasks every now and then.

What if you want to pause the project for a few months? What if you have downtime for a few weeks?

You’d still be paying a large chunk of your budget to an in-house security team. However, with outsourcing security management, you can be flexible.

One of the biggest advantages of outsourcing security services is that it can be done on an “as-needed” basis. It gives businesses the ability to quickly scape up with an already trained and knowledgeable staff that can handle the dynamic volume of business.

Depending on your company size and needs, it’s possible to easily scale up and down to a different number of security experts as needed when outsourcing.

6. Quickly Deploy New Technology

An efficient outsourced IT organization will have the right talent and resources to begin and manage new projects quickly.

Managing and deploying the same project in-house might take a considerable amount of time to hire the right people, provide training, and offer the required tools and software support they need.

However, outsourced IT services come bearing years of experience and knowledge in various projects. So you can save time and money from the beginning of the project without much hassle.

7. Stay Focused

Having a professional cybersecurity team allows you to focus on other important aspects of your business: growing and supporting your business, managing operations, expanding marketing, perfecting the product development process - not troubleshooting hardware or software and user issues.

With an outsourced IT team, you can collectively focus all of your energy, effort, and time on pushing your business to achieve your goals and not get distracted by other decisions.

Don’t let security services be the bottleneck that holds your company back. Instead, get an outsourced security expert team that lets you do what you do best - run your business effectively to grow more revenue.

Takeaways

With new cybersecurity threats emerging every day, it’s important for businesses to stay vigilant and maintain a healthy security posture. However, it’s challenging for SMBs to build and manage a robust security model, especially because of limited budgets and efficiency.

In these cases, the ideal option for you to consider is outsourcing your security services. This will not only help you cut costs but also maintain stringent security policies while you focus on business growth and management.

At Cypress Data Defense, we create custom security models based on the needs and assets of your business. If you’d like to talk to our security experts, feel free to drop a comment below or connect with us via email.

5 of the Top Cybersecurity Risks & Ways to Address Them in 2020

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:04:10 GMT

The number of cybersecurity risks - both external and internal - is continuously rising and show no signs of stopping. A host of new, more difficult to detect and sophisticated cyberattacks has the IT industry on high alert.

Attackers are launching intelligent attacks involving phishing, social engineering, malware, insider threats, and ransomware to gain access to consumers, companies, and even government data.

In addition to this, the huge cybersecurity skill gap isn’t making things any easier for businesses to overcome such a crisis. Over 68% of business leaders feel their companies’ cybersecurity risks are constantly increasing.

With damages related to cybersecurity estimated to hit $6 trillion annually by 2021, it is important for companies to take preventative measures and be proactive when it comes to cybersecurity.

Here is a quick overview of the biggest cybersecurity risks and ways to address them:

The New Normal Ep5: Mike Dean teaches the crew about health care innovation in The New Normal.

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Welcome to the fifth episode of The New Normal!

In this episode, we are joined by Mike Dean | KP Senior Innovation Consultant at KP Innovation. Mike teaches us what the word innovation means to him, plus how he managed to build himself a unique position at KP by being creative and persistent. Listen in if you are needing some insperation!

Subscribe on YouTube for future episodes. Watch out we will have another episode of The New Normal in a couple weeks!

If you want to learn more about the companies featured on the episode here are the links to their websites:

KP Innovation

Cypress Data Defense

Lark Security

What You Need to Know About Cyber Security in the Cloud

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Organizations are increasingly using cloud computing technology to build, deploy, and migrate to cloud-based environments.

While cloud service providers like Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) continue to expand cloud security services to protect their cloud infrastructures, it is ultimately the customer’s responsibility to implement proper cyber security in the cloud and secure their data stored within them.

Despite an array of benefits, protecting an organization’s data in a cloud environment that is publicly hosted can easily expose the organization to many threat vectors.

A survey revealed that the top cyber security challenges in the cloud are data loss (64%), data privacy (62%), followed by accidental leakage of credentials (39%) tied with compliance issues (39%).

As data continues to move to the cloud, many cyber security professionals are struggling to maintain the security of their cloud environments.

Cloud computing is opening up new challenges.

When using cloud services, be it software-as-a-service (SaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), the customer always has some level of responsibility for protecting their data from attackers.

With SaaS services, their control is primarily with restricting access and encrypting data if SaaS allows it. With platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and IaaS, the organization takes on significantly more responsibility for protecting data.

Overcoming Cloud Security Challenges in Cyber Security

Security issues in the cloud are a major concern for many organizations that are considering cloud computing services. The rapid growth of the cloud has not only highlighted the benefits of the cloud but also focused on the cloud security challenges that exist in its environment.

Is it true? Is cloud computing really insecure?

The answer is complicated.

Individual cloud computing services can be significantly secure by implementing the latest security measures. In fact, many cloud service providers do a great job of integrating security into the cloud infrastructure and making it more secure than many other organizations do.

However, not every cloud service provider is like this, so care must be taken in reviewing the cloud provider’s security posture.

Security in cloud computing is dependent on the users as well. Failing to properly adhere to the security standards and addressing security risks in a timely manner can lead to an otherwise preventable cyberattack or data breach. This requires that companies understand and mitigate cloud security risks in an effective manner.

Most security issues in the cloud are centered around data and access because the majority of shared responsibility models in cloud computing services leave those two aspects completely up to the customers.

As a result, attackers have been targeting their focus on this potential security vulnerability. There are several challenges associated with cloud security. The most common problems for cloud computing security include:

Identifying and maintaining the necessary security controls
Balancing the shared responsibility of maintaining security between the cloud service provider and the user
Compliance with regulatory requirements to secure data in the cloud environment.

In a nutshell, cloud security is quite dynamic, majorly depending on how well the end user understands and addresses the cloud computing security risks and vulnerabilities.

Fortunately, cloud security risks can be largely mitigated by following cloud security best practices. Below, we’ve listed the top cyber security best practices in the cloud that can help you build and maintain a secure cloud environment.

Cyber Security: Best Practices in the Cloud

Want to leverage cloud computing in a secure manner? Here are some of the best cyber security practices in the cloud:

Implement Strong User Access Control / Least Privilege

Similar to the traditional software security process, administrators should implement strong user access control to define who can access the data and to what extent users can access it. This will help ensure that only authorized users can gain access to data in the cloud infrastructure.

Using the least privilege model, you can also ensure that users can only access data that they need to complete their tasks. This process of implementing user access control and least privilege can be easily automated to increase accuracy and save time as existing users and new users onboard to access new servers.

Use SSH Keys and Securely Store Keys

Secure Socket Shell (SSH) keys help establish secure server connections with private and public key pairs. Since they are used to access sensitive data and perform critical, privileged activities, it’s important to properly manage SSH keys and securely store them.

Companies should create special cloud computing and key management policies to monitor how these keys are created, managed, and removed when they reach their expiring period. For instance, any privileged session via SSH keys should be monitored and analyzed to meet both regulatory and cyber security needs.

Implement Encryption in the Cloud

Data encryption in cloud computing is essential for organizations as it helps ensure that the data moving to and from the cloud is encrypted and secure.

While choosing a cloud service provider, you need to be vigilant about your security needs for cloud deployment and data that will be stored in the cloud. Many cloud service providers offer cloud encryption services; many times you may want to manage your own encryption keys and not completely rely on your provider. Just manage this based upon your risk tolerance.

Encryption combined with other security protocols such as the principle of least privilege (PoLP) enables organizations to meet stringent regulatory policies such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR.

Perform Routine Penetration Tests

Cloud penetration tests help identify security vulnerabilities in the cloud infrastructure.

For cloud computing, pen tests are often a shared responsibility which means that both your organization and your cloud service provider can perform penetration tests to detect security vulnerabilities in the cloud.

Is pen testing in the cloud different from other pen tests?

Typically, a pen test in the cloud computing environment does not differ much from other pen tests. While there are key differences in the way the cloud applications and infrastructure are set up, the principles of the pen test remain the same - identifying and mitigating security vulnerabilities.

Hardened and Controlled Images

A hardened virtual server image is basically an image devoid of anything unnecessary to the specific task at hand and has its configuration secured tightly. These images are built in accordance with appropriate cloud security standards with the lowest access privileges and admin permissions, and only the ports and services that are required.

Hardening and controlling images is a key component to a Defense-in-Depth strategy that limits cloud security vulnerabilities and protects your organization.

Implement Multi-Factor Authentication

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) protects your company data and user accounts using an array of authentication methods such as one-time passwords, biometrics, security questions, and many others.

How will MFA help ensure better cloud computing security?

By implementing MFA in your cloud computing environment, you can limit the access to data in the cloud to only authorized users and prevent the risk of lost, stolen, or compromised credentials.

Scanning for Vulnerabilities and Unapproved Hardening Processes

Misconfigurations in the cloud computing environment can create exploitable security weaknesses.

According to a report, companies have, on average, at least 14 misconfigured IaaS events running at any given time, leading to an average of about 2,300 cloud misconfiguration incidents per month.

To avoid such cyber security vulnerabilities, you’ll need to audit your IaaS configurations for access management, encryption, and network configuration.

Further, consider automatic scanning of hardened images, docker containers, and all newly deployed servers to identify security vulnerabilities that might have been introduced in the cloud computing environment while deployment or management.

Don’t just look for existing cyber security vulnerabilities, continually scan your environment for any items that are not in the proper hardened configuration. If something has shifted from the hardened configuration, replace it with the approved hardened image. Remember, cattle not pets!

Wrapping Up and Looking Ahead

Cloud computing comes with its fair share of benefits as well as challenges. While cyber security in the cloud is a shared responsibility of both the cloud service provider and the user, many organizations don’t properly fulfill their responsibilities, at the expense of their clients.

Whether due to negligence or lack of knowledge, misuse of your cloud environment can have severe consequences. Make sure you implement stringent cloud computing security policies to ensure your data in the cloud is secure.

Running a cloud infrastructure isn’t an easy task and we get it.

Our security team consists of top security and subject matter experts on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, as well as knowledgeable security trainers who can help you with questions you should ask your cloud service provider before buying cloud services.

We also offer security audits to detect and mitigate security vulnerabilities in cloud infrastructure to make it easy for you to secure your cloud environment.

Pre-Launch Android App Security Checklist

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Frequent updates, complex backend, and feature-rich Android applications are released daily to major app stores. Yet, many apps become victims of cybersecurity attacks before they even get a chance to bloom.

Employees, stakeholders, and customers can use mobile apps, so there are various threat vectors, and maintaining the security of the mobile application and the backend services is imperative for businesses today.

Some of the common mobile security exploits affecting Android apps are:

Weak authentication and authorization
Security vulnerabilities in servers, networks, third-party libraries, and integrated browsers
Injection flaws, such as SQL injection
Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities
Exposure of sensitive information

Implementing application security starts with requirements and design and continues throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC).

What are the security considerations for Android mobile applications?

To help you ensure security in your Android application, here is an Android app security checklist to get you started with security considerations for designing, testing, and releasing secure Android apps.

Mobile App Security Checklist: What You Need to Do Before Launching Your Android App

This mobile application security checklist can help you get started towards maintaining application security.

Of course, you should have security experts conduct a more thorough review, as this app security checklist covers mainly the basics.

#1. Protect Data Storage with Encryption and Use of the Keystore

Data storage security plays a crucial role in Android application security. You will store data on different devices, networks, or systems for all sorts of reasons, and this mobile app data could include sensitive information such as credit card info, user credentials, or much more.

You should ensure your data is secure and encrypted to prevent loss.

Consider using Android Keystore, which provides access to a secure location for storing sensitive data, such as cryptographic keys or user credentials. When a key is generated in the secure hardware, you can also specify access controls to protect its use.

Additionally, ensure no sensitive information is displayed through the mobile app user interface or exposed via IPC (inter-process communication) mechanisms. Also, no sensitive information should be written in application logs or shared with third parties unless it is an essential part of the architecture and those interactions are tightly controlled.

#2. Secure Platform Interaction by Configuring WebViews

It is important that the mobile application uses standard components and platform APIs in a secure manner. For this, ensure the mobile application only requests the minimum permissions necessary.

All inputs from the user and external sources must be validated and sanitized if necessary. This includes data received from the IPC mechanisms, such as network sources, custom URLs, or intents.

Ensure the mobile application does not export critical features through IPC facilities or custom URL schemes unless they are properly protected. Check if WebViews are configured to allow only the minimum protocol handlers required. Potentially harmful handlers, such as app-id, tel, and file, should be disabled.

Clear the WebView’s storage, loaded resources, and cache before it is destroyed. If the mobile application's native methods are exposed to WebView, it should only render JavaScript contained within the application’s package.

Moreover, the implementation of object serialization by using secure safe serialization APIs also helps maintain secure platform interaction.

#3. Leverage Cryptography to Maintain Mobile App Security

Cryptography is an important aspect of securing the user’s data, especially in a mobile environment, where attackers may have physical access to the mobile device. Cryptography aims to maintain data authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality, even while facing an attack.

Android developers should know the Java Cryptography Architecture (JCA) security providers that their software uses. They should consider using the highest level of the pre-existing app security framework that can support their application’s use case.

Ensure the mobile application uses proven methods of cryptographic primitives (such as one-way hash functions, digital signatures) and does not depend solely on symmetric cryptography with hardcoded keys as the only encryption process. (Don’t use hardcoded keys!!!) Ensure the mobile application does not use cryptographic algorithms or protocols considered deprecated for security reasons.

To maintain mobile app security, use different cryptographic keys for multiple purposes. Make sure keys are used for specific purposes, not a single key that encrypts everything. Use multiple keys to minimize the blast radius if a key is compromised.

Furthermore, make sure that all random values are created using a secure random number generator. Using KeyStore, which offers a mechanism for the storage and retrieval of cryptographic keys, helps you store keys for repeated use without much hassle.

#4. Implement Strong Authentication Controls

No Android app security checklist is complete without authentication best practices. Authentication is the process of validating a user’s identity to determine whether or not they are who they claim to be. If the mobile application providers users with remote services, they should integrate an acceptable form of authentication, such as a username and password, at the remote endpoint.

Create a strong password policy for your mobile application that involves stringent guidelines that users must follow. Have them use long passwords or passphrases that have not been previously compromised. Also, if a user submits incorrect authentication credentials more than a specific number of times, they should be temporarily blocked from further accessing the account or asked to provide more information to prove their identity.

Authentication schemas can be complemented with passive contextual authentication, which includes IP address, geolocation, device being used, and time of day.

Ideally, such an authentication system compares the user’s context to previously recorded data to detect anomalies that might indicate potential fraud or account abuse.

Further, the mobile application should inform users of recent activities such as login attempts, transactions, etc.

Use multi-factor authentication, which typically includes one-time passwords via time-based tokens or email on registered contact details, secure tokens, PINs, biometric authentication, and more to validate a user’s identity.

#5. Using TLS Certificates to Protect Data-in-Transit

Network security in Android apps is inherently risky, as it involves transmitting potentially personal data to the user (and back to the servers).

Mobile users are increasingly becoming familiar with privacy and security concerns of mobile apps, especially if an Android app performs transactions across the network, so it’s essential that your mobile application implements all mobile app security best practices towards keeping the user’s data secure at all times.

Data-in-transit should be secured, which means the sending/receiving and stored data inside your application should be secured with TLS or VPN tunnel communication.

Having these certificates and processes integrated into your application’s network helps build a secure channel consistently throughout the mobile application.

For instance, Transport Layer Security (TLS) helps encrypt data as it moves on the network. If the mobile operating system does not support TLS, the TLS settings should ideally follow best practices or be as close to the recommended standards as possible.

Attacks that can be induced from input data over an IPC or network when using native code should be controlled properly by managing buffers and handling pointers. When a secure channel is established, the mobile application should verify the remote endpoint's X. 509 certificate. Only certificates signed by a trusted CA are accepted. Preferably, pin your certificates.

Understanding Mobile App Defense In-Depth

No sensitive app data should be included in the backups generated by the mobile’s operating system. The Android app should not hold sensitive data in memory longer than required, and memory should be cleared explicitly after use.

The Android app should enforce a minimum device-access-security policy, requiring the user to set a password. Access tokens and sessions should be invalidated at the remote endpoint once a user has logged out of the application or after a predefined period of time.

In addition, the mobile app should not rely only on a single insecure communication channel (SMS or email) for sensitive operations, such as account recovery, sensitive transactions, or enrollments.

The application should also be able to detect if it’s running on a rooted device. Depending on the business requirements, either the app should be terminated or the users should be warned if the device is rooted.

The mobile application should notify users about all login activities via email or SMS, providing a list of devices used to access their account, the time and location from which the app was accessed, and an option to block specific devices.

Is Your App Ready to Launch?

Maintaining mobile app security is highly recommended as the number of cyberattacks targeting mobile apps is continuously rising. This Android application security checklist will help you ensure that your application follows the best security practices and protect your users from becoming a cyberattack victim.

It is important to be familiar with and follow the Android security best practices, as they reduce the possibility of introducing mobile app security issues that can potentially affect your users.

To determine whether your Android app follows the best mobile app security practices, you can also contact Cypress Data Defense, and a mobile app security expert can help you analyze your existing application’s security posture.

OWASP Top 10 Mobile Vulnerabilities Developers Need to Understand

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

With the growing number of mobile apps, it’s imperative that mobile developers stay vigilant about security vulnerabilities and have the know-how to mitigate them. With the OWASP mobile top 10 vulnerabilities, developers can learn how to maintain the security of their mobile apps to protect them from cyberattacks.

Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a community-based foundation that focuses on spreading awareness about software and application security. OWASP organizes several leading training and education programs in the field of cybersecurity as well.

Let’s take a closer look at the OWASP top 10 mobile app vulnerabilities.

Which Are the OWASP Top 10 Mobile App Vulnerabilities?

Understanding these security vulnerabilities will help you assess your mobile app better and maintain strong security to protect your data and users.

Here are the OWASP top 10 mobile vulnerabilities that you should be aware of:

1. Weak Server-Side Controls

Weak server-side controls include virtually everything that a mobile app can do poorly which doesn’t occur on the mobile device.

Then why is it in the list of OWASP top mobile vulnerabilities?

Because of the fact that most mobile apps also rely on a connection with the server, that makes them comparable to traditional client/server applications. However, that’s not the issue.

The problem is that mobile developers often do not consider traditional server-side security concerns.

In addition to this, while the majority of the security threats are fairly similar to those of web applications, an attacker’s ability to handle and gain control of a mobile device is quite different from what it is on the web.

There are various reasons that lead to server-side control issues:

Lack of security knowledge and implementation
Frequent updates and rush to market
Using easy to work with frameworks which do not prioritize security
Assuming the mobile operating system takes complete responsibility for the security for mobile apps
Inefficient cross-platform integration and development

#How to Prevent Weak Server-Side Controls

The first and most important step to prevent weak server-side controls is to scan your mobile apps. This will help you get an overview of your mobile app’s security and identify security vulnerabilities that you may have overlooked while developing the app.

It’s recommended that you should use automated scanning tools to scan your mobile app, however, often these tools report false positives and negatives. That’s when you need human intervention. This is where it is best to hire a security expert.

Manually assessing the mobile app for security vulnerabilities will help you detect issues that may have gone undetected by automation.

In addition to this, you need to follow a secure coding development life cycle (SDLC) which includes secure coding standards and practices for developers. While it may take longer to implement secure coding practices, it helps reduce security vulnerabilities significantly.

2. Insecure Data Storage

Let’s check out the next OWASP mobile app vulnerability.

We all know storing personal or sensitive data such as credit card numbers or passwords requires a secure mechanism. Typically, developers use files and databases to store data on the client-side in mobile apps assuming that will restrict users from accessing the data.

However, recent trends show that most mobile application security breaches have been caused due to unnecessary or insecure client-data storage.

How can attackers leverage insecure data storage?

Attackers can easily root or jailbreak the mobile device and circumvent the security of mobile apps. Another way they can hack into a mobile application is if they physically attain the mobile device and connect it with a computer with freely available software.

These apps enable the attacker to see all third-party application directories which often contain stored data such as the sensitive information of users or the organization. Then an attacker can modify the legitimate mobile app to steal or delete critical data.

This could lead to several business problems such as:

Identity or credential theft
Fraud
Market reputation damage
Poor customer relationships

#How to Prevent Insecure Data Storage

It is recommended to not store data in mobile apps unless absolutely necessary. For instance, never store user credentials on the phone’s file system. Prompt the user to authenticate using an API or standard web login scheme whenever they try to access the app.

When caching or storing information is necessary, consider using a standard encryption library such as CryptoKit in iOS. However, for especially sensitive apps, use white-box cryptography solutions that help prevent binary signature leakage which is commonly found in common encryption libraries.

For local storage in an android app, use the enterprise android device administration API to implement encryption of all local file-stores using “setStorageEncryption”. You should securely store encryption/decryption keys; never store in code or in configuration files.

3. Insufficient Transport Layer Protection

Insufficient transport layer protection is one of the OWASP top 10 mobile security vulnerabilities caused by mobile applications that do not protect their network traffic.

Basically, data can be exchanged between the client and the server side. If the mobile application is developed poorly, then attackers may leverage this security vulnerability and be able to view the sensitive data-in-transit.

While many developers integrate SSL/TLS certificates, they often fail to fully verify those certificates or fail to pin those certificates. This can lead to the network traffic being compromised.

#How to Prevent Insufficient Transport Layer Protection

Fortunately, insufficient transport layer protection attacks are easy to prevent. Always consider that the network layer could be insecure and vulnerable to eavesdropping.

Employ TLS to transport layers that the mobile app uses to transmit session tokens or any other critical information to the web service or backend API.

Utilize certificates signed by trusted CA providers and pin those certificates that are known and trusted. Implement powerful, industry-standard cipher suites that have appropriate key lengths. Make sure you build a secure connection only after authenticating the endpoint server’s identity using trusted certificates in a keychain.

4. Unintended Data Leakage

When a developer inadvertently puts sensitive data in an insecure location on the mobile device, it could result in unintended data leakage.

Here’s why this OWASP mobile app vulnerability could be dangerous:

The insecure location could be accessible to other mobile apps running on the same device, thus leaving the mobile device vulnerable to attacks.

The code of the mobile app becomes susceptible to serious attacks since threat vectors can easily exploit these data leakage vulnerabilities. An attacker can simply add a small piece of code to access the location where the sensitive data is stored.

What are some common data leakage points?

Below are the most common leakage points that you should monitor:

Copy/paste buffer caching
Browser cookie objects
URL caching
Application backgrounding
Keyboard press caching
Data analytics shared with third-parties

#How to Prevent Unintended Data Leakage

To prevent data leakage from caching mechanisms, set appropriate input types such as “password” types. This way, you can automatically block caching and prevent copying the content to the clipboard.

5. Poor Authorization and Authentication

Poor authorization and authentication is another major OWASP mobile app vulnerability.

Here’s how:

Poor or missing authentication schemes allow attackers to bypass authentication protocols and gain access to sensitive data in a mobile app. They do so by anonymously executing functionalities within the backend server or the mobile app.

Many mobile apps use a 4- or 6-digit PIN code for authentication. Performing a check on the client side is insecure as it would require the PIN code to be stored on the mobile device, which increases the risk of it being leaked.

Moreover, there are various mobile apps that do not expect users to be online at all times during their session. Since mobile internet connections aren’t as reliable as traditional web apps, mobile apps that require offline authentication to maintain uptime are more vulnerable to attacks.

Developers should be aware that these authentication methods can create security vulnerabilities in the mobile app. In their offline mode, mobile apps can allow users with fewer privileges to execute actions and gain unauthorized access to sensitive data.

While poor authentication and authorization are commonly prevalent in mobile apps and often go undetected, their technical and business impacts are severe.

#How to Prevent Poor Authorization and Authentication

Security testers should perform attacks against the mobile app while it’s in offline mode to detect poor authentication and authorization schemes. They can force the app to bypass offline authentication protocols and try to execute functionalities that require authentication. Having a secure code review performed is also very helpful. Ideally, this should be done frequently throughout the SDLC.

Security testers can also try to execute privileged functionalities that require the authorization of a required level while the mobile app is still in the offline mode. Weak authorization will allow an adversary to successfully execute functionalities they are not authorized to execute.

Additionally, ensure that all authentication requests are performed on the server side. This will ensure that the app data is only loaded after successful authentication.

If client-side data storage is required, make sure the data is encrypted using an encryption key which is securely derived from the user’s login credentials along with a strong randomness source.

6. Broken Cryptography

Data security and cryptography go hand in hand. Insecure usage of cryptography or broken cryptography is one of the most common OWASP mobile vulnerabilities.

Mobile developers often implement encryption and decryption on the device with a hardcoded key in the source code which leaves data security and cryptography vulnerable to attackers that can reverse-engineer the mobile application.

How can attackers do reverse-engineering in mobile apps?

iOS applications are secured from reverse engineering by default using code encryption. The iOS security model requires the mobile application to be encrypted and signed by trustworthy sources to execute in a non-jailbroken environment.

When the app is started, the iOS app loader decrypts the mobile application in memory and executes the code after verifying the signature by iOS. In theory, this prevents an attacker from launching binary attacks against the mobile application.

However, the attacker can use tools such as GBD or ClutchMod to download an encrypted app on a jailbroken device and take a snapshot of the decrypted mobile app once the iOS loader decrypts it onto the memory. This could allow an attacker to exploit the mobile app.

Using custom encryption algorithms instead of modern ones that are accepted as strong by the security community is also a way to mishandle cryptography.

Many cryptographic protocols and algorithms have shown significant weakness or are insufficient in protecting mobile apps today. These include:

SHA1
RC2
MD5
MD4

#How to Prevent Broken Cryptography

Avoid storing sensitive data on a mobile device unless necessary. Make sure you apply cryptographic standards that will withstand modern attacks. Also, follow the NIST guidelines on recommended cryptography algorithms.

7. Client-Side Injection

Attackers inject malicious code on the client side which is typically provided in the form of input data to the mobile application through various means. This OWASP mobile app vulnerability can be a big threat to your business.

Since the data is malformed, if the mobile application processes it (like any other data) and the underlying framework interprets the malformed data as executable, the code will be executed by the mobile app.

What happens when the code is executed by the mobile application?

The code might execute with privileged permissions with a greater scope of access leading to significant compromise.

Moreover, other forms of client-side injection involve the direct injection of binary code via binary attacks into the mobile application. Such an attack to execute malicious code may lead to even greater potential damage than input data injections.

#How to Prevent Client-Side Injection

There are several ways to prevent client-side injection in mobile apps. Here are some best practices for both iOS and Android mobile apps:

iOS

Validate all untrusted data.
Use trusted encoders to sanitize untrusted input for things like XML injection, XSS, and command injection.
Use input validation and sanitization.
Make sure the input data supplied by the user is passed through a parameterized query when designing SQLite queries.
Ensure that all UIWebViews calls do not execute unless appropriate input validation.

Android

Validate all untrusted data.
Make sure you use parameterized queries whenever you are accessing the database with input parameters.
Verify that the Plugin support and JavaScript are disabled for WebViews.
Verify data and actions are validated through an Intent Filter.

8. Security Decisions Via Untrusted Inputs

Mobile developers often use hidden values, files, or other hidden functionalities to distinguish between high-level users from low-level users.

If an attacker can intercept the IPC (Inter-Process Communication) or web service calls and tamper with such sensitive information, they can gain unauthorized access to the mobile app.

Poor implementation of such hidden functionalities could lead to improper behavior of the mobile application and it might also grant unauthorized access and grant higher privilege permissions to an attacker.

This could lead to bypassing the security mechanisms of the mobile application leading to loss of integrity and confidentiality. At the same time, this OWASP mobile app vulnerability could impact your business’ reputation and hamper its ability to build trust among customers.

#How to Prevent Untrusted Inputs

Security protocols such as input validation, authorization controls, authentication mechanisms, canonicalization, and output escaping should be carefully examined to ensure best security practices are implemented.

Also, developers should exercise extra caution while accepting and validating URL schemes.

For iOS specifically, avoid using the deprecated handleOpenURL method to manage URL Scheme calls. Rather use a whitelist containing trustworthy applications.

9. Improper Session Handling

Often mobile developers allow non-expiring or long user sessions to make the mobile app user friendly and easier to use. This helps reduce the time to purchase and checkout so that the company can generate more revenue. Moreover, reducing the logging in time reduces the friction for the users.

Mobile applications use OAUTH tokens, SSO services, and cookies for session management. To ensure proper session handling, the mobile application must authenticate the user via the backend and then issue a session cookie to the mobile app.

Improper session handling occurs when an attacker can gain access to a session token during a transaction between the mobile application and the backend servers.

What is the impact of this OWASP mobile app vulnerability?

An attacker who has access to the session tokens can impersonate a legitimate user and carry out sensitive transactions. In severe cases, an attacker might impersonate an administrative user and gain access to higher privileges, which is dangerous.

#How to Prevent Improper Session Handling

To enable proper session handling, configure session timeouts in the Login Server connection to a value less than session timeout on the server-side. Do not use poorly generated or easily guessed session tokens. A session token should have high entropy and should be unpredictable.

Also ensure that the mobile app code creates, maintains, and deletes the session tokens properly over the course of a user’s mobile app session.

10. Lack of Binary Protection

Lack of binary protection is another serious OWASP mobile app vulnerability.

It can expose the mobile app’s sensitive data such as intellectual property, credentials, etc. to the attackers. Using reverse engineering, attackers can discover such sensitive information as business logic, passwords, API keys, etc.

An attacker may use automated tools to reverse engineer an app and modify it to perform malicious actions.

If you are hosting the code of the mobile app in an untrustworthy environment, such as an attacker’s phone, there’s a possibility that your app could be exploited by attackers.

#How to Prevent Lack of Binary Protection

Sure, lack of binary protection is one of the worst vulnerabilities in the list of OWASP top mobile vulnerabilities. But there is a way to prevent it.

One of the most effective ways to prevent a lack of binary protection is to store sensitive business logic and API keys on the server. Furthermore, don’t store passwords in the mobile app’s binary.

Use commercial obfuscators to make it difficult for an attacker to reverse engineer your code!

Make sure that the mobile apps don’t write sensitive information on the log files since these files can be monitored as well. If you intend to store sensitive data, ensure it is stored in an encrypted file system or database.

The mobile app should also follow secure coding techniques for the following security components:

Debugger detection controls
Certificate pinning controls
Checksum controls
Jailbreak detection controls

The mobile application must be able to detect modifications in the code during runtime and should be able to react appropriately to ensure code integrity compliance.

Takeaways

Preventing cyberattacks and maintaining data security in mobile applications is crucial for mobile app developers.

Don’t hesitate to implement the best practices mentioned above to improve your mobile security. Take extra precautions and make sure your mobile app’s data integrity and confidentiality are protected.

Now that you have proper information about the mobile OWASP top 10 mobile app security vulnerabilities and ways to prevent them, you can build a secure mobile application for your users.

To learn more about how you can secure your mobile data, reach out to us at info@cypressdatadefense.com and our security experts will help you build a secure mobile app.

The Impact of Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities and their Prevention

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

There are many different security vulnerabilities in web applications - some security vulnerabilities are common yet cause little to no damage if exploited by an attacker. Other security vulnerabilities are rare yet can cause severe damage if abused by attackers.

Then there’s another category of security vulnerabilities, i.e the ones that are common and dangerous like cross-site scripting. Popularly known as XSS, cross-site scripting is one of the most common security vulnerabilities found in web applications and it can cause severe damage if not mitigated in a timely manner.

Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities continue to remain a major threat to web applications as attackers exploiting XSS attacks can gain control of the user’s account and steal personal information such as passwords, bank account numbers, credit card info, personally identifiable information (PII), social security numbers, and more.

What's worse is that victims of XSS attacks, both the user and the developer of the web application, often won’t be aware that they’re being attacked.

What Are XSS attacks?

Cross-site scripting or XSS is a web security vulnerability that allows attackers to run code in your users browsers that the attacker controls.

When this malicious code is executed in a victim’s browser, the attacker can easily gain control of their data, compromise their interaction with the web application, and perform malicious actions.

In essence, cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks are used to trick a web application into sending malicious script through the browser, and each time an end-user uses the attacked page, their browser will run malicious scripts as part of the page.

Why are XSS attacks difficult to prevent?

XSS attacks are hard to prevent because there are various vectors where an XSS attack can be used in web applications. Additionally, whereas other vulnerabilities such as OS command injection or SQL injection can be prevented by using appropriately prepared statements, cross-site scripting or XSS prevention typically requires specific output encoding wherever the untrusted data is being written back to the browse.

Types of Cross-Site Scripting Attacks

There are three types of cross-scripting attacks:

Stored XSS (Persistent XSS)

In general, stored XSS occurs when an attacker injects malicious content (often referred to as the “payload”) as user input and it is stored on the target server, such as in a message forum, comment field, visitor log, database, etc.

When the victim opens the web page in a browser, the malicious data is served to the victim’s browser like any other legitimate data, and the victim ends up executing the malicious script once it is viewed in their browser.

Reflected XSS (Non-persistent XSS)

Reflected XSS occurs when the attacker-supplied input has to be a part of the request sent to the web server. It is then immediately reflected back in such a way that the HTTP response includes the malicious data from the HTTP request.

Attackers use phishing emails, malicious links, and other techniques to trick victims into making a request to the server. The reflected XSS malicious data is then executed in the victim’s browser.

Document Object Model (DOM) Based XSS

DOM-Based XSS occurs when a malicious payload is never sent to the server i.e the entire data flow takes place in the user’s browser. In a DOM-based XSS, the source of the data exists in the DOM, the sink is also in the DOM, and the data never goes out of the browser.

This type of cross-site scripting vulnerability is difficult to detect for Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) and security teams who monitor server logs because the attack is not visible to them.

What is the Impact of Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability?

The impact of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities can vary from one web application to another. It ranges from session hijacking to credential theft and other security vulnerabilities. By exploiting a cross-site scripting vulnerability, an attacker can impersonate a legitimate user and take over their account.

If the victim user has administrative privileges, it might lead to severe damage such as modifications in code or databases to further weaken the security of the web application, depending on the rights of the account and the web application.

Here are some of the most common impacts of cross-site scripting attacks:

Account Hijacking

Attackers often steal session cookies in the browser to hijack legitimate user accounts. This allows attackers to take over the victim's session and access any functionality or sensitive information on their behalf.

Assuming a malicious actor managed to steal the session cookies of an administrative account, the attacker can gain administrative access to the entire web application.

Credential Theft

One of the most common XSS attack vectors is to use HTML and JavaScript in order to steal user credentials. Attackers can clone the login page of the web application and then use cross-site scripting vulnerabilities to serve it to the victims.

When a victim uses the vulnerable web page and inputs their credentials, they are forwarded to a server under the attacker’s control. This way, attackers can obtain the credentials of a user in plaintext instead of hacking their session cookies, which may expire.

Data Leakage

Another powerful XSS attack vector is exfiltrating sensitive data, such as social security numbers, personally identifiable information (PII), or credit card info, and performing unauthorized operations, such as bank transactions.

Once the attacker has access to the personal or sensitive information of users, they can demand ransom payments from the organization to delete the data, or leak the information of their customers.

How Can You Prevent Cross-Site Scripting Attacks?

Now that you know more about cross-site scripting attacks and their impact, let’s take a look at how you can prevent cross-site scripting or XSS attacks.

Output Encoding

Output encoding is the primary defense against cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. It is the process of converting untrusted data into a secure form where the input is visible to the user without executing the code in the browser.

You can protect your web application from various forms of cross-site scripting by using HTML entity encoding before sending untrusted data into a browser.

Avoid Inserting Untrusted Data Except in Allowed Locations

The first rule to protect your web application from cross-site scripting attacks is to deny all untrusted data in your HTML document except if it comes under the following conditions:

HTML Entity: If you want to insert untrusted data into the HTML body, for example, inside normal tags such as [< p >, < td >, < b >, < div >,] etc, implement some rules. While many web frameworks have an HTML escaping method for these characters, it’s not sufficient for other HTML contexts. Consider using HTML entity encoding to escape these characters so that they don’t switch into any execution context, like event handlers, style, or script.
HTML Attribute: If you want to insert untrusted data into typical attribute values such as value, name, width, etc, escape all characters that have less than 256 ASCII value with the “&3xHH;”.
CSS: Attackers can easily leverage CSS to launch XSS attacks on a web application. Therefore, it’s important to have necessary security measures in place. If you want to put untrusted data into a style tag or a stylesheet, only use it in a property value and avoid putting it in other places in the style data. Steer clear of putting untrusted data into complex properties such as behavior or URLs.
URL: This rule is specifically when you want to put untrusted data into the HTTP GET parameter value. Consider escaping all characters with ASCII values less than 256 using the “%HH” format. Ensure all attributes are quotes properly as unquoted attributes can be easily broken with various characters such as *, [space], /, %, etc.
JavaScript: If you want to insert untrusted data into the JavaScript code, the only secure place you can do that is inside a quoted “data value”. Escape all characters with less than 256 ASCII value using the “\xHH” escaping format to prevent untrusted data from switching into another attribute or script context.
In short, for all of these different contexts, look for an encoding library that handles html entity, html attribute, javascript, css contexts, etc. There are some good libraries out there that have been thoroughly vetted; make use of them!

Implement Input Validation

The idea behind input validation is to consider any untrusted data as malicious. Any data that comes from outside the trusted network or system can be considered as untrusted data.

Input validation is the process of validating that a web application is rendering only trusted and correct data to prevent malicious data from entering into the system and doing harm to the site, users, and database.

Input validation should always be done but can provide a basic level of protection to prevent XSS in forms, as it forbids a user from adding special characters into the fields. The recommended way to do this is to utilize whitelisting which only allows known characters on a web application, thereby helping prevent XSS attacks.

While it provides for a basic level of protection, the recommended approach is to use output encoding as a more robust defense.

Use Security Headers

Preventing all cross-site scripting or XSS flaws in a web application can be difficult, therefore you should also implement ways to contain the impact of a cross-site scripting flaw. For instance, you should set the HTTPOnly flag of your session cookie and other custom cookies you may have that are not accessed by any JavaScript codes you wrote.

Another great way of mitigating the impact of an XSS flaw can be implementing a robust content security policy. Basically, a content security policy is a browser-side mechanism that helps you create source whitelists for the client-side resources of your web application like CSS, JavaScript, images, etc. It uses a special HTTP header to instruct the browser to only render or execute resources from those whitelisted sources.

Further, you can also set the X-XSS protection header to “X-XSS-Protection: 0” to disable the XSS Auditor, preventing it from taking the default browser to handle responses.

Takeaways

While using security layers, such as the methods above, is an effective way to combat many types of XSS attacks, it is crucial to remember that these prevention methods cannot guarantee complete protection of your web application.

Preventing cross-site scripting vulnerabilities also requires that you perform thorough code reviews, automated static testing during development, and dynamic testing once the web application is deployed in the production phase to reveal security vulnerabilities. In addition to this, using secure coding practices will also help prevent security vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting.

If you want to get a security expert on board to check your web application for security flaws, you can reach out to us via info@cypressdatadefense.com or drop a comment below and we’ll get in touch with you!

Open Box and Closed Box Testing: Outlining the Difference Between Them

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Security testing is a crucial step of the software development life cycle (SDLC) because it ensures that the software development process and application deployed in the production environment are secure. An ideal security testing process is a holistic approach that involves various testing techniques.

The two most common security testing approaches are open box testing and closed box testing. Let’s check out what these testing methods are for and what the differences between them are.

What is Open Box Testing?

Open box testing, also known as transparent box or glass box testing, is a security testing technique where the internal code is visible to the tester. It primarily focuses on strengthening security, verifying the flow of inputs and outputs through the application, and improving the usability and design of the software.

By conducting open box testing, testers can analyze coding practices, data flow, information flow, control flow, and error and exception handling within the system, to verify the intended and unintended behavior of the software before it is deployed in the production environment.

Conducting proper security testing before launching the software helps you overcome security issues that might hamper the functionality of the application at a later stage. Security flaws in any software can be classified as major or minor depending on the risk profile of the web application.

The first step in open box testing is to assess the source code, analyze available design documentation, and other relevant development artifacts, to evaluate the security levels of software.

Second, the testers should be able to think like an attacker to create test cases that exploit software. Third, testers should be familiar with different techniques and tools available for open box testing to perform testing on software and web applications effectively.

Types of Open Box Testing

Open box testing consists of various testing techniques used to assess the security and usability of a block of code, an application or a specific software package.

Open box testing usually includes source code reviews, both manually and automatically using SAST tools. Additionally, tests against the running application may be conducted where specific functionality is tested for security defects.

Unit Testing

Unit testing is typically the first type of testing done on an application. It is performed on each block or unit of code as it is developed. It is the responsibility of developers to ensure that thorough unit testing is done to verify if the code is working as intended.

Let’s suppose that, as a software developer, you develop a code, a single object, or a function, and want to know if the code you have written is functioning properly. You conduct unit testing on the code to ensure it works appropriately before you jump into the next section and start coding further.

Unit testing helps facilitate the quick identification of security vulnerabilities early in the software development life cycle (SDLC). If you are able to identify security issues early through testing, then you can easily fix them in your software.

Testing for Memory Leaks

Memory leaks are hard to detect and tend to impact the entire application by making it run slower. Unless testing is performed at a basic level, memory leaks could exist in an application and cause various problems.

Open box testing helps identify potential memory leaks in a software application. An experienced quality analyst (QA) who knows how to detect memory leaks plays an important role in cases where applications or software are running slow.

What are the Advantages of Open Box Testing?

Open box testing can begin in the early stages of the SDLC focusing on independent code units.
Since the tester is familiar with the functionality of the code, designing test cases becomes easier for effective testing.
In open box testing, the tester can easily trace back to the original source of the issue, thus helping the tester quickly fix the problem.
Helps identify “unintended” features in the software that may be introduced during implementation and impact the security of the software.
Open box testing can be more easily automated.
It can direct security engineers to problematic areas of code where security controls may be in place but are not fully effective. These can be more easily identified by looking at the code than by testing it dynamically.

What are the Disadvantages of Open Box Testing?

While open box testing may sound like the ideal way to test your software applications, it does have its fair share of drawbacks. The most prominent disadvantages of open box testing are:

Open box testing can be time-consuming and expensive.
Every time the code of a software solution is modified, test cases may have to be rewritten completely, which is a tedious process.
Open box testing requires people who understand code and security in software programs and this is a harder skillset to find.
If you have a large amount of code for an application, it is very difficult to cover each and every aspect of it in a timely manner with open box testing.

What is Closed Box Testing?

Closed box testing is a fundamental part of routine security testing activities. It is a high-level security testing technique which aims to evaluate the security of the application without actually looking into the internal structure of the software application.

In open box testing, the testers are familiar with the internal architecture of the software being tested, but they aren’t in closed box testing. This may lead to them missing security vulnerabilities in the software as they may not fully understand the flow as well as someone who can read what the code is doing (as in open box testing).

In closed box penetration testing, the testers can conduct testing just like an attacker would carry out an attack. This way, testers can discover security vulnerabilities when the software application is running in the production environment.

Primarily, the closed box pen test helps identify a wide range of security vulnerabilities in a software solution such as server misconfiguration, input or output validation issues, and other problems that may be encountered in the runtime.

Types of Closed Box Testing

There are many types of closed box testing used to assess software applications, but here are some of the major ones that you should know about:

Closed Box Penetration Testing

In closed box penetration testing, the tester does not need to have prior information about the application being tested and can perform testing keeping it as real as an attacker-led scenario. It enables the security tester to think out-of-the-box and perform tests according to their practical knowledge and expertise.

Testers use all tricks and methodologies at their disposal to emulate the expertise level, knowledge, and persistence of potential attackers.

From remote access exploitation to brute force attacks, testers would make real-life attempts to breach security. The end goal of closed box penetration testing is to verify the integrity of the software applications and proactively identify security risks that pose a direct threat from an attacker.

Regression Closed Box Testing

Regression closed box testing is done whenever the internal structure of the application is altered to ensure its functionality and behavior is working as intended. The alteration could be code fixes, upgrades, or any other debugging/maintenance processes.

The software tester ensures the new code does not impact the existing security of the application. Frequent security tests are conducted to analyze if an upgrade has impacted the security of the application.

What are the Advantages of Closed Box Testing?

Since the application is tested from the outside only, the tester does not need to have knowledge of software programming languages or specific technical skills to perform closed box testing.
Closed box testing is an effective testing method for complex and large applications.
Testers try various techniques to try to break into the application to simulate actual attacks to look for unexpected results.
Common security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, CSRF, XSS, etc. are extensively checked with this testing method
Closed box testing also helps check for server misconfiguration issues
Test cases for open box testing can be designed immediately after the completion of development and specifications.

What are the Disadvantages of Closed Box Testing?

Closed box testing tends to overlook potential security vulnerabilities that may be caused due to a lack of secure coding practices or design in the application. For example, cryptographic issues are hardly ever identified in closed box testing, and they only are for the most gross defects
This testing method does not provide the exact source of the security issue, so developers have to invest time into identifying the location of the security vulnerabilities identified in closed box testing.
Test cases for closed box testing can be redundant if clear and concise specifications are not designed.
Some types of vulnerabilities in a software solution are extremely difficult or impossible to detect with closed box testing, e.g., cryptography errors.

Key Differences Between Open Box Testing and Closed Box Testing

In open box testing, the tester is required to have software programming knowledge of the application whereas in closed box testing, the tester doesn’t require programming knowledge to analyze the application.
Open box testing is performed with the knowledge of the internal structure of the application, whereas, closed box testing is done without the knowledge of the internal structure of the software application.
Open box testing is focused on the code conditions, structure, branches and paths, whereas closed box testing is focused on the functionality and behavior of the application.
Open box testing provides high granularity test reports, whereas closed box testing provides low granularity test reports.
Open box testing is a time-consuming and exhaustive process, whereas closed box testing is a less time-consuming and exhaustive process,
Open box testing is done at the lower levels of testing such as unit testing and integration testing, whereas closed box testing is done at a higher level testing such as system testing, acceptance testing, security testing, etc.

Takeaways

Open box testing and closed box testing are both important for enterprise applications. You can easily integrate open box tests with your closed box tests and run the entire suite in minutes, prior to pushing a new application or software solution built into the production environment.

The combination of these two testing methods will help ensure the software application is not just functioning and behaving as intended, but also ensures that it is secure. Having security vulnerabilities in your application can make it susceptible to attacks such as SQL Injection, XSS, DDoS, etc.

At Cypress Data Defense, we have created and optimized security testing using various testing methods through automation testing, manual testing, and artificial intelligence. We help enterprises secure their SDLC processes and applications, with significantly cost-effective methods.

If you are interested in learning more about Cypress Data Defense, please reach out to us at info@cypressdatadefense.com.

How To Prevent Data Tampering In Your Business

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Who likes people messing with their stuff? We’ve learned (or known) since we were toddlers, what is ours is OURS and we don’t want people messing with OUR stuff. Same is true for our organization’s data. Don’t let attackers mess with it!

One of the most critical assets of an organization is this data and it is among the top priorities of businesses to prevent their data from being tampered with.

Cyberattacks have witnessed a substantial increase every year.

While organizations are addressing these security concerns, data authenticity continues to be one of the most critical factors when it comes to cybersecurity. Thus, companies are now finding ways to prevent data tampering and enforce better security in their organizations.

Before we dive into the best ways for data tampering prevention, let’s take a look at how it affects your organization and why you should be concerned about it.

What Are the Risks of Data Tampering?

According to the National Health Services (NHS), they lost $100 million to the WannaCry ransomware attack. What’s more disturbing is that cyberattacks such as ransomware often involve some kind of data tampering.

Attackers insert malicious files that change the configuration of a network or system, modify user credentials to gain access to sensitive data, or tamper with log files.

Imagine if an attacker infiltrated your company’s network, modified your customers’ data, and then tampered with the log files to cover their tracks.

How long would it be before you realized you have become a victim of data tampering?

Would you be able to trace the attack back to the attacker or secure your customers’ data?

Attackers are increasingly using ransomware, a type of malware attack during which hackers encrypt an organization’s data or system and demand for ransom to release the decryption keys.

According to Coveware, the average amount of ransom demand increased to $84,116 in the last quarter of 2019.

While it is advised that companies do not pay ransom to attackers, often such attacks could leverage sensitive data of a company, and may threaten their entire business all at once. Data tampering can have far-reaching, severe consequences on an organization.

Two of the most important steps to contain the damage due to data tampering is to quickly detect that your data has been modified or tampered with and to maintain good backups of your data that are separated from your core data (so they cannot be tampered with). Clearly, it is imperative that businesses stay vigilant to protect their data from tampering attacks.

Let’s check out what you can do for data tampering prevention.

How Can You Prevent Data Tampering?

As businesses handle large volumes of data on a regular basis, prevention against data tampering has become necessary.

Here are 5 effective ways you can use for data tampering prevention:

1. Enforce Encryption for Data-at-Rest and Data-in-Transit

Unprotected data, whether at rest or in transit, leaves organizations vulnerable to data tampering and other cyberattacks. One of the most effective ways to protect data-at-rest and -in-transit is encryption.

Simply put, data encryption is the process of translating data from one form into another that unauthorized users cannot decrypt.

How can data encryption prevent data tampering attacks?

For example, you store your customers’ credit card details in a database, so by encrypting data-at-rest, you are essentially converting your customers’ sensitive data into an encrypted format that cannot be decoded or read without a decryption key.

While attackers may be able to tamper with the encrypted data, they cannot tamper it in a meaningful way. For example, they cannot change a transfer from Steve -> Joe to Steve -> Attacker.

To protect data-at-rest, you can simply encrypt sensitive data prior to storing it or encrypt the storage drive itself. For encrypting data in transit, you can use encrypted connections such as SSL, TLS, HTTPS, FTPS, etc.

To further strengthen your data encryption, assign role-based controls to ensure only authorized users have access to the encrypted data. Additionally, you can also implement multi-factor authentication to increase security.

2. Copy-on-Write File Systems

Copy-on-write, often referred to as COW, is a concept used to maintain instant snapshots on database servers. It can also help with data tampering prevention.

Each time a database is modified, delta snapshots are taken. Security teams can detect data tampering by monitoring snapshots and checking for unexpected file system snapshots.

Many database applications and operating systems (such as Linux, Unix) come with a built-in snapshot feature. This makes it easy for enterprises to integrate COW or any other similar technology and stay updated about their database modifications.

COW also helps protect data against potential cyberattacks such as ransomware based encryption attacks. Thus, it becomes easier to restore the file system to a pre-attack state with data in its original state, retrieve lost data, and eliminate any downtime.

3. Data Integrity using HMACs

Hash-based message authentication code (HMAC) is a type of message authentication code (MAC) that consists of a cryptographic hash function and a secret cryptographic key.

Basically, an HMAC is a way of signing a message/file so that if the data is tampered with, it is very easy to detect and then you know not to trust the tampered data.

How does HMAC work for data tampering prevention?

When two or more parties exchange data through secure file transfer protocols, the data is accompanied by HMACs instead of just plain hashes. This technology consists of a shared secret key and a hash function.

A hash is taken of the message and that is then signed by the shared key. A shared secret key helps exchanging parties ensure the authenticity of the data. Thus, providing a way to verify whether the data and HMAC they receive is really from the authorized, expected sender and the message has not been altered.

4. File Integrity Monitoring (FIM)

File integrity monitoring is a powerful security technique to secure business data and IT infrastructure against both known and unknown threats. FIM is the process of monitoring files to check if any changes have been made.

How does this technology help with data tampering prevention?

It assesses system files and generates a cryptographic checksum as a baseline. Then, the FIM repeatedly recalculates the checksum of the same resources, compares it to the baseline, and if it detects changes, it generates a security alert.

FIM systems typically monitor user credentials, privileges, identities, operating systems, configuration files, application files, and encryption key stores.

FIM systems are resource-intensive, especially while dealing with large amounts of data and those that change frequently. That said, it’s crucial to monitor files that are more vulnerable to cyberattacks or are confidential so that you invest your resources efficiently.

5. WORM systems (Write Once Read Many)

Write once read many (WORM) systems refers to a storage technology where data, once written, cannot be overwritten or modified. This technology has long been used for archival purposes of large enterprises and government agencies.

WORM systems offer a long-term storage strategy that ensures users cannot accidentally or intentionally erase or modify data. This technology provides virtual protection against erasure of data.

Compromising data on WORM systems is difficult at best, but still possible if an expert with a high degree of technical knowledge has unrestricted access to the deepest levels of the operating system and gains access to the WORM drives.

To ensure your WORM systems are well-protected, implement user access controls such as least privilege models that give users access to only what they need in order to perform their jobs.

Takeaways

Data tampering is an emerging cybersecurity issue that could be devastating for an organization.

While the impact of data tampering varies depending on the business value of the data compromised, it is more likely to cause severe damage to enterprises.

Data tampering prevention can include simple security measures such as the encryption of data, and can include lengths such as using file integrity monitoring (FIM) systems for better security.

Ultimately, which solution works best for you to secure your data against potential threats depends on your organizational needs.

We can help you run security audits to ensure that your organization is secure from data tampering attacks and help you implement a sound, robust security model.

7 Types of Malware Attacks and How to Prevent Them

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Ugggh, malware. That common security issue that we’ve all known about since the dawn of computing still exists. Every company needs to handle it. Every personal computer needs to handle it. Every mobile device has to handle it. So let’s talk about common malware types and their impact!

There are new malware attacks being discovered regularly. Varonis recently found the Monero crypto-jacking malware during a cybersecurity investigation that secretly exploited a company for over a year.

Social attacks are being developed to target customers and software programs via social networking sites, in an attempt to trick them into downloading malicious software (malware). A report revealed that 94% of malware was delivered by email in 2019; a staggeringly high number.

What are the effects of malware?

Malware can frequently be used as the initial step in an attack that can eventually lead to identity theft, data loss, or leakage. All of which can take a toll on your market reputation. People will think you’re stupid if you cannot handle this common issue! You don’t want that!!

As you know, malware attacks can potentially be the first step to take over your computer system, hijack your network, and redirect you to malicious sites that may look legitimate at first, but contain harmful code or data that could cause data breaches.

What’s more dangerous about malware is that it can spread itself to other systems and what initially may have started as a small scale breach can eventually take down an entire organization’s systems in a short period of time.

While most anti-virus software programs will try to address all of these, some make exclusive use of application signatures to reject known bad malware.

This is usually not very successful as malware is coming out at such high frequencies (and adapt) that it is difficult to keep a full list of malware.

More anti-virus systems are using heuristics to try to detect malicious behavior. A good option to prevent malware is to use application whitelisting where only known and trusted applications are allowed to run, all others are rejected.

What Are the Most Common Types of Malware Attacks?

There are numerous malware types, however, we have shortlisted some of the most common and dangerous types of malware attacks.

1. Spyware

As its name suggests, Spyware is a common type of malware designed to spy on target users and gather information such as credentials, bank details, internet activity, transaction details, and more. This is the annoying one (who am I kidding, they’re all annoying!)

Attackers use this common malware type to track, monitor, and gain access to the company’s confidential data or the sensitive information of users. This could also include social security numbers, personally identifiable information, passwords, HIPAA-covered data, credit card numbers, etc.

This stolen information could lead to data leakage and impact the company’s reputation.

#How Can you Prevent Spyware Attacks?

Spyware isn’t as malicious as other common malware types but you still need to handle it.

How do they hit your software programs and computer systems?

Attackers often use pop-up windows infected with spyware to target victims. Once the user clicks on the link or window, they accidentally install the spyware on their computer. Hence, it is recommended that users should refrain from clicking on suspicious pop-up windows or links.

Antivirus software programs and application whitelisting are good options to address this malware issue.

2. Adware

Adware, as the name suggests, is a type of malware designed to automatically deliver advertisements to users to generate revenue for its creator. Often adware is closely related to spyware and shows up in the form of ads installed in software or programs, or in pop-up windows.

This type of malware could redirect a user’s browser searches to a look-alike, harmful website containing malicious links and data that could impact the user’s system or network.

It aims to expose the compromised end-user to potentially malicious advertising, or harmful programs that might compromise the user’s computer functionality and impact their data protection. This might lead to an invasion of data privacy and could cause data leakage or identity theft.

#How Can You Prevent Adware Attacks?

Attackers typically use unknown websites to create adware, therefore users should be cautious about websites that look untrustworthy. Moreover, it is recommended that users should only download programs from reputed websites that are authorized and safe to use.

While browsing websites, avoid clicking on notices, pop-ups, or advertisements. This way, you could significantly reduce the likelihood of your system getting infected with adware. Additionally, keep your operating system up to date as outdated systems are more susceptible to viruses and malware exploits.

You can also set up browser extensions that block ads or pop-ups to prevent malware attacks. Furthermore, install an antivirus software program that scans each file you download as this will give you real-time protection against both adware and spyware.

3. Trojans

Trojans are one of the most common forms of malware. Attackers disguise trojan attacks as attractive deliverables such as gift cards, special coupons, offers, etc. to infiltrate a user’s computer system. Think “trojan horse” here.

This type of malware mimics legitimate programs, but they contain malicious instructions. They typically show up in the form of emails or links and push users to click on the infected website or link.

The most common type of trojan attacks use a fake antivirus software program, which shows as a pop-up, claims that the user’s device has been infected, and then instructs the user to run a program to clean their computer system.

Users often fall victim to such malicious links and follow the instructions, which leads to severe consequences such as data loss, theft, or leakage.

#How Can You Prevent Trojan Attacks?

Trojans need your permission to access your computer, either when you download a malicious file or run the program yourself. One way you can defend yourself against this type of malware is to never run a program or open an email attachment if you’re not sure about its source or authenticity.

However, there are only so many restrictions you implement while opening an email, given today’s interconnected world, so a few more specific security measures are called for.

You can take the following measures to protect your system against Trojans:

Install antivirus software
Configure your firewall to reject malicious traffic
Whitelist applications that are allowed to run on your systems (highly recommended)

4. Ransomware

Ransom malware, or ransomware, is a type of malware that encrypts user data files and/or system files using an encryption key that is only known to the attacker.

This is how ransomware affects the user:

The user then loses all access to their data and system and the attacker then offers to “sell” the encryption key to the user so that they can decrypt their files.

If the ransom is not paid, the attacker may publish or delete data. However, there is no guarantee that paying the ransom will restore access to your system or data.

How does this type of malware attack your system?

Ransomware emails use social engineering to trick users into clicking on links that may appear as legitimate. They could be appearing from a legitimate source like a friend or your employer. That’s what makes ransomware particularly malicious.

Once executed, this type of malware can encrypt the user's files within a few minutes and lock them out.

#How Can You Prevent Ransomware Attacks?

This type of malware can cause severe damage and can even lead to complete data leakage or loss if you don’t have a validated, safe backup of your data.

Make sure you use cloud storage that includes multi-factor authentication and high-level encryption to create regular backups (and maintain offline backups) of your data.

As always, application whitelisting is another good option to prevent ransomware.

5. Viruses

A virus is a malicious computer program that can modify legitimate host files, replicate itself, and spread to other devices. This type of malware can infect web applications, script files, documents, and various other programs.

What are the most common side effects of viruses?

A significant reduction in computer speed, compromising software such as firewalls, and modification of data files are some of the most common effects of viruses. A computer virus can also modify or delete data on a computer, use an email program to spread itself, or even delete data on the hard disk.

Once it infiltrates the computer system, a virus can install spyware or ransomware leading to future damage. Some viruses can also remain dormant for a period of time, waiting for a specific trigger such as a specific date or an action.

#How Can You Prevent Virus Attacks?

One thing to keep in mind about virus attacks is that they typically exploit vulnerabilities in software code or operating systems to infect your system. If there are no potential vulnerabilities or loopholes in your system to exploit, you can prevent the virus from spreading even if your system gets infected by it.

Keep your computer systems updated and patched, creating an inventory of hardware so that you know what you need to protect, monitor potential vulnerabilities in a system, and take appropriate security measures.

As always, application whitelisting is another good option to prevent ransomware.

6. Worm

A worm is similar to a virus in the way that it’s self-replicating and it can infect other systems. However, what makes this type of malware more dangerous than a virus is its ability to spread without end-user action. It can attach itself to an existing program and self-propagate.

A worm can install backdoor programs, slow bandwidth, and even delete data files until the drive is empty. Since worms do not require human intervention to spread, they are difficult to defend against and rid from computer systems.

#How Can You Prevent Worm Attacks?

Once a worm infects a computer system, the process of eliminating it is similar to that of removing any kind of malware. You can implement a firewall to restrict or limit network traffic, especially unauthorized users.

Since the major infection vectors for computer worms are software vulnerabilities, make sure your computer’s applications and operating systems are up to date. Install these updates and patch systems as soon as they’re available.

Be aware of phishing emails that are from unknown sources that contain untrusted links or attachments. Additionally, be sure to invest in a good cybersecurity solution that can help you block suspicious malware threats. A good phishing solution should be able to defend your computer system against ransomware, spyware, viruses, and other malware threats.

7. Malvertising

Malvertising is a type of malware that uses a legitimate ad or ad network to deliver malware to the target users’ computers.

For instance, an attacker might pay to place an ad on a legitimate website and then insert a malicious code inside the ad. When a user clicks on the ad, the code inside the ad will run and either redirect the user to a malicious website or install malware on their computer.

Cybercriminals typically use malvertising to deliver malware including banking trojans, cryptomining scripts, or ransomware.

#How Can You Prevent Malvertising?

Attackers can trick users easily with malvertising, given these ads are placed on legitimate websites.

The best way to protect yourself against malvertising is to invest in good antivirus software. Make sure that once you install it, you keep it up to date. Additionally, install an ad blocker software program so that you don’t accidentally click on malicious ads.

Final Thoughts

The damage caused by common malware types can be extensive - from significant downtime in computer systems to large scale data breaches.

If a computer is infected with malware, it can potentially take down the entire organization’s systems with it, leading to severe dysfunction and a data breach. Malware can delete critical system elements, cause data leakage, thus having long-term impacts on an organization. More importantly, it can make you look bad if you aren’t handling malware appropriately.

However, there are ways to protect your computer system against malware attacks and maintain better security. Be it a software patch, or running security audits regularly, a small security measure can help defend your organization against malware attacks.

Most users are often unaware that their computers have been hacked, and this is where you should get a professional expert to run a quick security check on your computer systems. If you have security measures in place, great! But there’s always scope for improvement to ensure you are safe from malware attacks.

We run in-depth security checks to ensure your organization is secure and well-protected.

6 Password Security Risks and How to Avoid Them

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

You know what? People suck at passwords. We use weak passwords, we reuse passwords. Or we write down passwords or store them in equally insecure ways. These practices make our data very vulnerable. It’s no surprise then that attackers go after them.

Of course, the password authentication process exists. Still, getting access to passwords can be really simple.

Method 1: Ask the user for their password Method 2: Try a password already compromised belonging to a user Method 3: Try a weak password across multiple users … and many more.

In 2018, hackers stole half a billion personal records, a steep rise of 126% from 2017. That’s why an organization’s password policies and requirements should be designed with the utmost precision and scrutiny.

What companies need are robust password policies that proactively identify vulnerable user accounts and prevent the use of weak passwords susceptible to password cracking. Being able to go out and discover poor passwords before the attacker finds them is a security must.

Before we dive into ways to protect your passwords, we’ll first need to understand the top password security risks.

What Are the Top Password Security Risks?

Here are some of the top password security risks:

1. Phishing/Sniffers/Keyloggers

One of the easiest ways to get access to someone’s password is to have them tell you. Through this method, hackers can even bypass the password authentication process.

Here’s how:

Attackers target users by tricking them into typing their passwords into malicious websites they control (known as phishing), by infiltrating insecure, unencrypted wireless or wired network (commonly known as sniffing), or by installing a keylogger (software or hardware) on a computer.

These methods provide fairly easy ways for attackers to steal credentials from users by either tricking them into entering their passwords or by reading traffic on insecure networks.

2. Brute Force/Cracking

A common way for attackers to access passwords is by brute forcing or cracking passwords. These methods use software or automated tools to generate billions of passwords and trying each one of them to access the user’s account and data until the right password is discovered.

A brute force attack is one in which an attacker will try all combinations of letters, numbers, and symbols according to the password rules, until they find the one that works.

Brute force attacks aren’t usually successful when conducted “online” due to password lockout rules that are usually in place. However, they can often go undetected if the attacker can obtain a copy of the system’s password file, or download the hashed passwords from a database, in which case they are very successful.

Once the attacker has a copy of one or more hashed passwords, it can be very easy to determine the actual password. This is known as offline password cracking.

Basically, cracking is an offline brute force attack or an offline dictionary attack. If you used every single possible combination of letters, numbers, special characters, etc., this is an offline brute force attack.

If you use modified “dictionaries”, huge lists of words (across multiple languages) with character substitutions, commonly used passwords, etc., this is an offline dictionary attack. If an application stores passwords insecurely (using simple basic hashing), these cracking methods (brute force or dictionary attacks) will rapidly crack (compromise) all of the download password hashes.

3. Weak Passwords

Since users have to create their own passwords, it is highly likely that they won’t create a secure password. It might be because users want to have a password that’s easy to remember, or they aren’t up-to-date with password security best practices, or they use patterns to generate their passwords like using their name or birthdate in their passwords.

While it’s relatively easy for users to remember these patterns or passwords, cybercriminals are also aware of these formulas people use to create passwords. These types of passwords typically result in weak and insecure passwords vulnerable to cracking.

4. Reuse of Passwords and Use of Compromised Passwords

Often, users tend to use similar passwords across different networks and systems which makes their passwords vulnerable to hacking.

Wondering how?

The number of cyberattacks is increasing by the day, so even if one website or system’s data is compromised, it’s likely that attackers will obtain users’ credentials. If a user uses similar passwords across different platforms, the attacker can access their data on other sites and networks as well.

5. Password Recovery/Reset Systems

Systems that allow users to recover or reset their password if they have forgotten it can also let malicious actors do the same. Remember, a forgotten password mechanism is just another way to authenticate a user and it must be strong!

Cybercriminals can mimic users and attempt to gain access to users’ accounts by trying to reset the password. Online systems that rely on “security questions” such as “birthday” or “pet’s name” are often too trivial for authentication as attackers can easily gain basic personal details of users from social networking accounts.

6. Clear Text Passwords in Code and Configuration Files

Clear text passwords pose a severe threat to password security because they expose credentials that allow unauthorized individuals to mimic legitimate users and gain permission to access their accounts or systems.

What are clear text passwords?

They can be either passwords that remain visible on the screen after being typed by the end user, or passwords stored in clear text in configuration files or codes with no encryption in place to protect the stored data.

Clear text passwords, be it as inputs or in configuration files, are highly vulnerable to password cracking and other cyber attacks.

Password Management and Protection: What You Should Do

There are many ways to protect your account against password cracking and other authentication breaches.

Here are some of the most effective, easy-to-implement, and optimal solutions to help protect your passwords:

Education

One of the greatest security threats to your organization could actually come from within your organization or company. Insider attacks have been noted as one of the most dangerous types of security attacks as they involve people associated with the organization who are quite familiar with the infrastructure.

Many cybersecurity breaches can be prevented by enforcing strong security measures such as secure passwords and following security best practices.

By educating your staff about cybersecurity, you can defend your organization against some of the most common types of cyberattacks leveled against businesses.

For instance, phishing attacks which involve emails from spoof domain names that allow attackers to mimic legitimate websites or pose as someone familiar to trick employees into clicking on fraudulent links, or provide sensitive information.

If your employees are well aware of the best security practices, they can prevent an array of cyberattacks from taking place.

Secure User Password Storage

It is critical to secure user password storage in a way that prevents passwords from being obtained by attackers, even if the system or application is compromised.

As with cryptography, there are various factors that need to be considered.

A popular concept for secure user passwords storage is hashing. It is a one-way function, which means it is not possible to “decrypt” the hash and obtain a password. Strong hashing helps ensure that attackers cannot decrypt the hash function and obtain a password.

But simply hashing passwords is not enough, you want to make it difficult for an attacker to crack these passwords if your database is broken into and the password hashes are compromised. There are two things you should do.

First, salt your passwords. A salt, (a unique, randomly generated string) is attached to each password as a part of the hashing process. If a user has a very simple password such as “passw0rd”, a random salt is attached to it prior to hashing, say “{%nC]&pJ^U:{G#*zX<;yHwQ”. With a simple hash, an attacker just has to generate one huge dictionary to crack every user’s password. If salted, the attacker has to regenerate the least for each user (using the salt for each user). This makes the attacker’s job harder.

Additionally, rather than just using a hashing algorithm such as Secure Hash Algorithm 2 (SHA-2) that can calculate a hash very quickly, you want to slow down an attacker by using a work factor. Work factors basically increase the amount of time it takes for it to calculate a password hash. They can also increase the amount of memory it takes for an attacker to calculate a hash).

For a user, a ¼ second to calculate a hash is acceptable login time. For an attacker, who wants to calculate millions of passwords a second using specialized hardware, a ¼ second calculation time is too expensive. You can use an adaptive hashing algorithm to consume both time and memory and make it much more difficult for an attacker to crack your passwords.

Multi-Factor Authentication

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is when a user is required to present more than one type of evidence to authenticate themselves on a system or application.

MFA may use a combination of different types of authentication evidence such as passwords, PINs, security questions, hardware or software tokens, SMS, phone calls, certificates, emails, biometrics, source IP ranges, and geolocation to authenticate users.

MFA should be used for everyday authentication. If there is resistance to this, at a MINIMUM, it should be implemented for performing sensitive actions, such as:

Changing passwords or security questions
Authentication after failed login attempts
Changing email address or mobile number associated with the account
Using a privileged functionality
Unusual user behavior such as a login from a new device, different time, or geolocation
Disabling MFA

MFA is one of the best ways to defend yourself against the majority of password-related attacks, including password cracking, password spraying, and credential stuffing.

Password Recovery

Most of the applications and systems provide a password recovery system for users who have forgotten their passwords or simply want to reset their passwords. Often attackers may attempt to hack user accounts by using the password recovery system.

Remember that password recovery is a form of authentication, so the user must be able to provide evidence to prove their identity.

Use multi-factor authentication which uses a combination of passwords, PINs, and time-limited password reset tokens on registered email addresses or phone numbers associated with the user’s account to verify their identity.

Also, notify users about their password changes via email or SMS to ensure only authenticated users have access to their accounts.

Enforce Strong Passwords

Ensure that users have strong passwords with no maximum character limits. Make sure a password is a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, symbols, and numbers. The challenge with passwords is that in order to be secure, they need to be unique and complex.

However, complex passwords tend to be difficult to remember, which means they aren’t necessarily user friendly. To maintain security while providing ease of use to users, consider using long passphrases.

Passphrases are a random string of letters that are easier to remember, but relatively longer than passwords. In general, a good passphrase should have at least 6 words and should be generated, as everyday vocabulary is often not strong enough.

For instance: “vitals.toad.nestle.malachi.barfly.cubicle.snobol”

It is recommended to use a password manager to generate unique, complex passwords for you. They also combat password reuse and ensure that each password generated is unique.

Encrypting System Passwords

Encryption is one of the most important security password features used today for passwords. On many systems, a default administrative account exists which is set to a simple default password. These are trivially easy to try and break into. DON’T USE DEFAULT PASSWORDS.

Often, a hard-coded password is written down in code or in a configuration file. It’s quite simple for attackers to simply look up these credentials in the system once they gain basic access to a system. They then use these clear text system passwords to pivot and break into other systems.

Wherever possible, encryption keys should be used to store passwords in an encrypted format.

What about the keys used to encrypt the data?

A general rule is you should avoid using keys because an attacker can easily obtain the key or your code, thereby rendering the encryption useless. You need to store keys securely in a key management framework, often referred to as KeyStore. It has two functions:

Randomly generates keys
Securely stores the keys

With these features, storing secret keys becomes easy. Since the KeyStore randomly generates and securely manages keys, only your code can read it, hence making it difficult for attackers to decrypt passwords.

Final Thoughts

Enforcing strong password policies is an effective way to beef up security, and enterprises should invest more time and resources into ensuring all stakeholders, including employees, third parties, and customers follow stringent password protocols.

There are many ways you can implement better password policies - enforce stringent password requirements, use tools to securely store data, use encryption, etc.

Cypress Data Defense uses next-gen tools that can discover and prevent weak passwords, protecting your organization against password cracking and other authentication based attacks.

For more information on authentication and password enforcement, you can reach out to us and we’ll ensure your data is secure.

SAST vs. DAST: Understanding the Differences Between Them

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

The exponential rise in malicious activities and cybercrime has made companies pay more attention to application security. It has also sparked widespread discussion about the benefits and challenges of various application security testing solutions available in the market.

Web application firewalls (WAF), interactive application security testing (IAST), and penetration testing (pen testing) are widely implemented security solutions. However, they are typically used to complement the two most popular application security testing solutions - static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST).

Both SAST and DAST are application security testing solutions used to detect security vulnerabilities that can make an application susceptible to attacks. SAST and DAST are two commonly used acronyms for developers and security testers, however, there is a lot of confusion around these two terms.

Which of these application security testing solutions is better?

Is SAST more effective than DAST at identifying today’s critical security vulnerabilities or is DAST better?

SAST vs. DAST: Which method is suitable for your organization?

Before diving into the differences between SAST and DAST, let’s take a closer look at what exactly SAST and DAST actually are.

What is Static Application Security Testing (SAST)?

Static application security testing (SAST) is a white box security testing method where the tester has access to the underlying source code. In SAST, the application is tested inside out.

Why should you perform static application security testing?

Companies build feature-rich, complex applications to engage customers and other stakeholders in multiple ways. If security vulnerabilities are not eliminated from these applications, they may expose customers’ sensitive information to attackers, which could lead to severe damage or cripple the business.

For instance, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is one of the most infamous types of attacks that target online services and web applications. It aims to overwhelm the application with more traffic than the network or server can accommodate which often renders the site inoperable.

According to a report, the average cost of a DoS or DDoS attack could cost more than $120,000 for a small organization and $2 million for larger organizations.

Considering most cyberattacks related to software vulnerabilities occur within the application layer, it is critical to implement robust security testing methods such as SAST.

Testers can conduct SAST without the application being deployed, i.e. it analyzes the source code, binaries, or byte code without executing the application.

SAST can be conducted early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) which means potential security vulnerabilities are found earlier in the SDLC, so it becomes easier to identify and mitigate them.

However, since SAST tools scan static code, it cannot find run-time vulnerabilities.

What Are the Benefits of Using SAST?

Let’s take a look at some of the advantages of using static application security testing:

SAST is a highly scalable security testing method.
It can be automated; helps save time and money.
It is ideal for security vulnerabilities that can be found automatically such as SQL injection flaws.
SAST can direct security engineers to potential problem areas, e.g. if a developer uses a weak control such as blacklisting to try to prevent XSS.
Since SAST tools determine the exact location of a vulnerability or flaw, it becomes easier for developers to locate vulnerabilities and fix them in a timely manner.

What Are the Challenges of Using SAST?

Using static application security testing does have some cons.

They include:

SAST tools are often complex and difficult to use.
It requires access to the application’s source code, binaries, or byte code, which some companies or teams may not be comfortable with sharing with application testers.
SAST tools cannot determine vulnerabilities in the run-time environment or outside the application, such as defects that might be found in third-party interfaces.
Each SAST tool typically finds different classes of potential weaknesses, which might result in a slight overlap between the results of different SAST tools.
Many false positives to weed through, you may want to consider a service such as Cypress Defense AppSec service where we run the SAST tool, get rid of false positives, and then insert true issues into your issue tracking system.

What is Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)?

Dynamic application security testing (DAST) is an application security solution in which the tester has no knowledge of the source code of the application or the technologies or frameworks the application is built on.

In DAST, the application is tested by running the application and interacting with the application.

It enables the tester to detect security vulnerabilities in the application in a run-time environment i.e once the application has been deployed.

Dynamic testing helps identify potential vulnerabilities including those in third-party interfaces.

Why Should You Perform DAST?

DAST provides insights into web applications once they are deployed and running, enabling your organization to address potential security vulnerabilities before an attacker exploits them to launch a cyberattack.

As your web applications advance, DAST tools continue to scan them to quickly identify and fix vulnerabilities before they become serious issues.

For instance, a common web-based attack is cross-site scripting (XSS), in which attackers inject malicious code into the application to steal sensitive data such as session cookies, user credentials, etc.

Another popular web-based attack is an SQL Injection, in which attackers insert malicious code in order to gain access to the application’s database.

DAST tools give development and security teams visibility into potential weaknesses and application behavior that could be exploited by attackers.

DAST helps search for security vulnerabilities continuously in web applications and it is recommended to test all deployments prior to release into production. Once these weaknesses are identified, automated alerts are sent to concerning teams so that they can analyze them further and remediate the vulnerabilities.

What Are the Benefits of Using DAST?

Let’s check out the pros of using dynamic application security testing:

DAST can determine different security vulnerabilities that are linked to the operational deployment of an application.
Testers do not need to access the source code or binaries of the application while they are running in the production environment.
DAST enables testers to perform the actions of an attacker which helps discover a wide variety of security vulnerabilities that may be missed by other testing techniques.
It helps testing teams explore security vulnerabilities beyond the application including third-party interfaces and outside the source code.

What Are the Challenges of DAST?

Here are some of the cons of using dynamic application security testing:

Delayed identification of weaknesses may often lead to critical security threats.
DAST tools cannot mimic an attack by someone who has internal knowledge of the application.
It cannot discover source code issues.
It is only limited to testing web applications and services
Many false positives to weed through, you may want to consider a service such as Cypress Defense AppSec service where we run the DAST tool, get rid of false positives, and then insert true issues into your issue tracking system.

SAST and DAST: What Are the Differences Between These Two Application Security Testing Solutions?

Many companies wonder whether SAST is better than DAST or vice versa. However, both of these are different testing approaches with different pros and cons.

Both these application security testing solutions find different types of security vulnerabilities, use different methods, and are most effective in different phases of the SDLC.

Here’s a comprehensive list of the differences between SAST and DAST:

SAST vs. DAST in CI/CD Pipelines

SAST: Static application security testing solutions can be integrated directly into the development phase, enabling developers to monitor the code regularly.

They cover all stages of the continuous integration (CI) process, from security analysis in the code of the application through automated scanning of code repositories to the testing of the built application.

This leads to quick identification and remediation of security vulnerabilities in the application.

DAST: Dynamic application security testing tools can only be used after the application has been deployed and running (though it can be run on the developer’s machine but are most often used on a test server) therefore delaying the identification of security vulnerabilities until the later stages of the development.

Vulnerability Coverage and Analysis

SAST: SAST solutions help detect both server-side and client-side vulnerabilities with high accuracy. SAST solutions are highly compatible with a wide range of code, including web/mobile application code, embedded systems, etc.

DAST: Black box testing helps analyze only the requests and responses in applications. This means that hidden security vulnerabilities such as design issues can go undetected when using Dynamic application security testing solutions.

Mitigate/Remediation Performance

SAST: With SAST solutions, code can be scanned continuously (though scan times can be lengthy) and security vulnerabilities can be identified and located accurately, which helps development and security testing teams to quickly detect and remediate vulnerabilities.

DAST: While DAST tools help identify security vulnerabilities in an application when it is running in a testing environment, it does not provide the exact location of those vulnerabilities.

Thus, developers and security teams have to waste time locating the points in the source code to correct the vulnerabilities detected by DAST. This can be a time-consuming process that can be even more complicated if a new member who is not familiar with the code has to fix it.

Cost Efficiency

SAST: White box security testing can identify security issues before the application code is even ready to deploy. While this is very helpful, SAST does need to know the programming languages and many newer frameworks and languages are not fully supported.

This makes SAST a capable security solution that helps reduce costs and mitigation times significantly.

DAST: DAST is implemented after the code has been compiled and the application is in a run-time environment, so it may not discover vulnerabilities until later stages of the SDLC.

Missing these security vulnerabilities along with a delayed identification of existing vulnerabilities can lead to a cumbersome process of fixing errors. This also leads to a delayed remediation process.

Takeaways

Both types of application security testing solutions come with their own set of benefits and challenges, however, they can complement each other.

SAST can be used early in the SDLC process and DAST can be used once the application is ready to be run in a testing environment. Comprehensive testing can be done using both SAST and DAST tools to detect potential security vulnerabilities.

Which application security testing solution should you use?

The ideal approach is to use both types of application security testing solutions to ensure your application is secure.

While it may seem overwhelming at first, it’s well worth the time and effort to protect your application from cyberattacks so that you don’t have to deal with the aftermath of a breach.

If you’re wondering where to get started or want to conduct a security audit to ensure your SAST and DAST tools are in place, reach out to us. We’ll be happy to help you ensure your applications are secure.

What is Third-Party Risk Assessment and How Can You Do It?

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Today, insurance companies and investment enterprises tend to prioritize third-party risk management in the wake of several global trends. Namely, accelerated outsourcing in a milieu of increased prices, dependence on digital technology, and the awareness that many organizational breaches originate from trusted vendors who have themselves been compromised.

Hence, the reason third-party risk assessments and risk management programs have become imperative.

What is Third-Party Risk Assessment?

To understand the definition and necessity of third-party risk assessment, you must first note the causes of third-party risks. Various organizations, depending on their capacity, outsource certain operations to third parties. Those third parties may include suppliers, vendors, sub-contractors, contract manufacturers, resellers, distributors, partners, captives, or affiliates.

Why do some organizations outsource certain operations?

To decrease expenditures; accelerate production, distribution, and sales; or to increase profits, all of which lead organizations to have competitive advantages in their respective industries. Most commonly, organizations outsource to allow them to focus on their core areas of expertise and to leverage the expertise of these providers to incorporate into their overall offerings.

So, once you have these third parties incorporated in support of your service offerings, how can you come up with a risk management program for your organization?

Enter third-party risk assessment, which will aid your organization in gauging how (and on what terms) risky each of these third-parties is. With a well-designed risk assessment program, your business will be able to reduce third-party risks to your operations and growth.

Why Should You Do a Third-Party Risk Assessment?

Creating and maintaining third-party relationships are associated with multiple risks.

What kinds of risks?

Reputation, strategy, management, information security, and economic burdens. Other risks include data compromise, illegal use of information by third parties, the detrimental and damaging effects of non-compliance, and irregularities in supply chain management.

Particularly, the globalization of industrial operations has led third parties to emerge throughout the world. In turn, the graph of operation- and distribution-related risks has seen an upward trend.

Any natural, artificial, or deliberate disruption in any part of the modern world adversely affects the production and services offered by enterprises.

If a multinational enterprise lacks a strong risk management program to tackle such third-party risks, it may suffer economic as well as reputational losses. This creates the need for efficient risk assessment and risk management and entails the search for effective associated assessment services.

How to Perform a Third-Party Risk Assessment

Now that you have a better understanding of risk management and what a third-party risk assessment is, and why you should do one, let’s take a look at the step-by-step process of how you can perform one.

1. Establish Vendor Risk Criteria

Create a list of vendor risk criteria. It should include the most destructive third-party risks that your organization could possibly face.

For instance, enterprises managing or outsourcing confidential data should have various information security risks as part of their vendor risk criteria.

This, in turn, informs your organization’s risk assessment scope. Additionally, it impacts your actions and strategies and the techniques you will use for a third-party or vendor risk assessment. Based on such risk criteria, you can also narrow down your third-party or vendor choices.

This brings you to the next step for your risk management program: classifying vendors. Basically, you create an actionable list of high-risk third-parties with whom you will perform risk assessments.

2. Conduct Third-Party Onboarding and Screening

To predict and protect against any possible risk, you must create a detailed picture of third-party or vendor relations. The first step is to mandate standard processes of risk management throughout your company.

Experts suggest that you construct a third-party risk management program with a framework that will standardize all third-party onboarding and screening. If possible, you can also use a thorough approach of real-time risk checking and containment measures.

Well-designed frameworks for your risk management program offer a win-win situation:

You can keep abreast of any probable third-party risks (and risky vendors) prior to risk assessments. Furthermore, a framework for your risk management program will help you optimize time and undertake insightful risk assessments.

3. Make Risk Assessments Easier to Manage

As the quality of your assessment will directly impact your risk management program, you must ensure the quality of your assessments, simple check-box assessments do not suffice. For this purpose, you must comprehensively analyze if any vendor is risky, why they are, and how you (or they) can address those risks.

Thereafter, an agreement with a risky third-party will warrant meticulous and consistent monitoring.

Next, you will require specialized experts who will aid in the analysis of the data you have gathered. For example, professionals from policy, tech, cybersecurity, or account backgrounds can conduct holistic analyses and issue detailed reports. Today, powerful organizations deploy entire teams for such risk analysis programs.

4. Assess Performance Results, Not Only Risks

Results are symptoms of whether and to what degree your third-party relations are risky. For instance, information security ratings will enable you to consistently supervise your vendors’ compliance and unpredictable risks.

In case you have contracts with multiple third parties, keeping tabs on their information security and compliance scores will:

Enhance and ease third-party risk assessment,
Note any faults with security posture; and
Demand solutions to risky problems of the involved third parties.

5. Leverage the Power of Technology

Capital and resource availability are essential prerequisites for undertaking vendor risk assessments. To save on expenditures, you should consider purchasing and deploying software that eases the entire process of third-party risk assessment and management.

As a technology that provides assessment services, it will also standardize a cross-departmental framework for risk assessment in your organization.

Technology utilization is crucial to conducting holistic and thorough risk assessments and management.

Why?

For a number of reasons, including:

It gives you control over a platform through which you can regularly supervise any number of third parties and the related risks.
It increases your ability to predict and analyze internal and external third-party risks while influencing your assessment scope.
It helps you collect and macro-analyze solid data on third-party risks over multiple assessments, which will enhance your organization’s future decisions about any vendor.
It enables you to gauge the efficacy of risk assessment metrics, which marks the quality and reliability of your data.

Ready to Get Started with Your Third-Party Risk Assessment?

Regardless of the size of your company, you will likely maintain business relationships with many third parties who will help you streamline your operations.

However, exchanging operational data and confidential information with third parties can make that data and information vulnerable to misuse and exploitation, adding risk to the equation. Especially if the parties in question are lacking in optimum information security measures or compliance.

This makes it necessary for you to work on a risk management program.

As a stakeholder, it is your responsibility to conduct thorough third-party risk assessments to protect your company from risky businesses and supervise their operational standards and results at multiple levels.

How to Protect Your Data from Unauthorized Access

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Data protection is one of the primary concerns of organizations around the world today. Information security (InfoSec), which is primarily about prohibiting unauthorized access to information, is what makes data protection possible.

By 2020, security services such as security information and event management (SIEM) and other managed services are estimated to account for nearly 50% of cyber security budgets. This implies that enterprises are increasingly prioritizing cyber security and implementing better and more robust security practices to prevent unauthorized access by attackers or malicious insiders.

Is your data secure enough to prevent unauthorized access? In this article, let’s take a look at what you can do to boost your security.

Prevent Unauthorized Data Access: 9 Tips to Help You Boost Your Cybersecurity

There are several high-level security best practices that every enterprise should adopt to protect their data from unauthorized access. Here are our recommendations to help you prevent unauthorized data access:

1. Keep Current on all Security Patches

The first step for any organization to prevent unauthorized data access is to keep current on all the security patches.

Here’s why:

Security patches address vulnerabilities in software, operating systems, drivers, etc., that attackers might use to gain access to your device and your data. Security patches for operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Android, iOS are essential because an OS vulnerability can have severe consequences. Additionally, continually update drivers and software applications as new patches become available.

The WannaCry virus that took down more than 400,000 computer systems across 150 countries was one of the most severe attacks in recent years. It attacked the vulnerability in the SMB V1 (Server Message Block) protocol of Windows and was launched by using the EternalBlue exploit.

What’s interesting is that security patches for these vulnerabilities were available long before the attack was launched. But there were thousands of users who had not updated their security patches and thus, became victims of the attack.

With the use of updated security patches, users could have prevented giving unauthorized access for the system attacks.

It is important to ensure that you download the latest security patches and updates for your operating systems and other software to protect it against cyberattacks. You can also enable automatic updates so that whenever a security patch or update is released, the system automatically installs it.

By staying prepared and updated, you can protect your data from those trying to get unauthorized access to it.

2. Detect and Respond to Intrusions Quickly

Of course, you’d want to stay vigilant and be prepared to prevent hackers from unauthorized data access.

But what if you couldn’t detect an intrusion?

What’s the way forward?

The earlier you detect an intrusion, the earlier you can respond to it. Prevention is undoubtedly important, but monitoring user activity, login attempts, logs, and other activities can also provide insights into how secure your system is.

There are several ways you can detect and respond to intrusions quickly:

#IDS/IPS (Intrusion Detection System/Intrusion Prevention System)

An IDS uses known intrusion signs or behavior heuristics to assess network traffic for suspicious activities.

Intrusion detection is the process of monitoring and analyzing the activities in your network or system for possible signs of intrusion incidents like imminent threats, violations, or threats to your security policies.

On the other hand, an IPS complements an IDS by proactively monitoring a system’s incoming traffic to identify malicious requests. An IPS prevents intrusion attacks by blocking unauthorized or offending IPs, prohibiting malicious data, and alerting security personnel to potential security threats.

#SIEM (Security Incident Event Manager)

A Security Incident Event Manager, or SIEM, is a security management approach that enables security professionals to get insights into the activities within an IT environment. SIEM software collects and analyzes log data generated by the company’s technology infrastructure, from applications, host systems, networks, to security devices.

The software then detects and categorizes events and incidents, as well as analyzes them. Primarily, there are two main objectives of SIEM:

Track records and provide reports on security-related events and incidents, such as failed and successful login attempts, malware activity or any other suspicious activity.
Notify security personnel if any suspicious activity is detected that indicates a security threat.

#Implement User and Event Behavioral Analytics (UEBA)

To prevent unauthorized data access, you need to be on top of your analytics game.

User and event behavioral analytics helps detect any anomalous behavior or instances if there are deviations from a users’ “normal” behavioral patterns. For instance, if a user regularly downloads files of 10MB size every day but suddenly downloads gigabytes of files, the system would detect this anomaly and alert the administrator immediately.

User and event behavioral analytics uses algorithms, statistical analysis, and machine learning to determine deviations from established patterns, showing which anomalies are taking place and how they could result in a potential threat. In this way, you can get alerted about unauthorized data access.

Such analytics focuses on users and entities within your system, especially insider threats like employees who could misuse their privileges to carry out targeted attacks or fraud attempts.

3. Implement Principle of Least Privilege (Minimize Data Access)

Least privilege is the practice of restricting access rights for accounts, users, and computing processes to only those specific resources required to perform legitimate, routine activities. The 2019 Global Data Risk Report says that, on average, an employee has access to 17 million files.

Implementing least privilege can help you secure your data from providing unauthorized access. The principle of least privilege (POLP) enforces a minimal level of user rights which allows the user to access specific resources needed only to perform his/her role. It reduces the risk of exploitation by unauthorized users, applications, or systems without impacting the overall productivity of the organization.

While least privilege helps provide authority for only specific resources required to complete the job at hand, it also enforces better security practices and reduces the likelihood of your organization becoming a victim to a cyber attack.

4. Use Multi-Factor Authentication

It is essential for companies to use strong authentication by implementing robust password policies in addition to multi-factor authentication. That can go a long way in preventing unauthorized data access.

As the name suggests, multi-factor authentication requires multiple pieces of information to be presented by the user and validated by the system before they are granted access to the system. This makes it difficult for attackers to compromise users’ accounts as it takes more effort than simply cracking the password.

Multi-factor authentication might use a one-time password sent via an out-of-band communication channel such as an automated phone call or SMS text message to the authorized device of the user, a security question set by the user, or biometric authentication. Though this makes authentication a bit cumbersome, it ensures better security and forces the attacker to not only break the password, but compromise the second factor as well. This makes breaking authentication much more difficult for the attacker.

Want a pro tip to prevent unauthorized access to your data?

Leverage passphrases.

While multifactor authentication should definitely be used, you can also move towards the use of passphrases instead of passwords. A passphrase is a series of random words or a sentence that can also contain spaces in between words such as, “Ten herds of elephants bowl frequently in Tanzania!!”

A passphrase doesn’t have to be grammatically correct; it can be any combination of random words and also contain symbols. It can be easier to remember a complex passphrase than a complex password. Care must still be taken to generate strong passphrases. Simple passphrases that use only everyday vocabulary words may still be easily cracked.

5. Implement IP Whitelisting

Another way to prevent unauthorized data access is through IP whitelisting.

IP whitelisting helps limit and control access to only trusted users. It allows you to create a list of trusted and authorized IP addresses from which users can access your network. Typically a company uses the internet via a defined set of IP addresses, so they can add a list of all the trusted IP addresses that are allowed access.

By whitelisting IP addresses, you can grant permission to only trusted users within a specific IP address range to access specific network resources such as URLs, applications, emails, or more.

If someone with an untrusted IP address tries to access your network, they will be denied access. IP whitelisting also enables organizations to secure remote access to the network including Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) that allows employees to use their own devices.

6. Encrypt Network Traffic Inside the System

By encrypting network traffic, you can ensure that it cannot be intercepted by an attacker who might be snooping on the network traffic.

However, network traffic in server-to-server communications and inside data centers is often not encrypted. If an attacker gains access to such a network, they could intercept data in transit between servers in a multi-machine cluster.

To prevent attackers from snooping on data with unauthorized access, organizations are increasingly monitoring their own network traffic to detect intrusions. Companies might store copies of network traffic for long periods of time in their monitoring systems.

It’s crucial for all networks to use encryption if they store privacy-protected data. This applies to both the connections made by authorized users from outside the data center to access the system and network links between nodes in a multi-server system.

You can use a VPN layer between the users and the system or implement an SSL/TLS to encrypt network traffic. Inside the system, communications can be secured using IPsec, SSL/TLS, or some other VPN technology.

7. Encrypt Data-at-Rest

Encryption of data at rest ensures that data is stored securely and not as plain text. As data is written to the disk, it is encrypted via a set of secret keys which is known only to authorized administrators of the system.

The access to these secret keys is limited and controlled to ensure that only privileged users can access the encrypted data and use it. This technique safeguards the data from attackers who might attempt to gain remote access to the system and protect the data from being compromised.

It’s an effective way of shielding your data from anyone trying to get unauthorized access. Encryption-at-rest requires proper auditing of all places where data might be stored, such as caching servers or temporary storage devices.

8. Ensure Anti-Malware Protection/Application Whitelisting

Malware is one of the most common forms of cyberattacks. In fact, 1 in every 13 web requests leads to malware. It is a severe issue that plagues numerous computer systems, and it is infamous for cropping up in inconspicuous locations that are unbeknownst to the users.

Malware is software designed to attack or infiltrate a computer without the user’s consent or authorized access. Trojan horses, computer viruses, worms, scareware, and spyware are some of the most common types of malware attacks. They can be present on emails and websites, or hidden in attachments, videos, and photos.

Such malware can give hackers unauthorized data access easily.

Anti-malware protection is very important as it builds the foundation of security for your devices. Run good antivirus programs, avoid clicking on suspicious emails or downloading attachments from an unknown source, and do regular scans for spyware.

Alternatively, a stronger control is to utilize application whitelisting. It can be very effective in preventing unauthorized data access.

Doing this, you identify the known and trusted applications that are allowed to run on your computer systems and reject all others. Even if someone gets unauthorized access, they won’t be able to run the malware on your systems if the application has not already been approved as a whitelisted application.

9. Track and Manage Your Risks

A risk could be anything that potentially impacts your project’s performance, budget, or timeline. If these risks become substantial, they become vulnerabilities that must be addressed to avoid cybersecurity attacks.

It is critical that organizations identify, categorize, prioritize, and mitigate risks in an effective and timely manner. By tracking risks before they escalate, you can prevent them from becoming issues. Additionally, you should develop a response plan to tackle risks immediately.

Final Thoughts

Data protection isn’t a linear process or a one-time activity. You need to continuously invest resources, time, and effort into ensuring security from unauthorized data access.

Cybercriminals are getting more advanced every day and they use the latest technologies to target organizations and get unauthorized data access.

As data breaches increase, you need to be more vigilant. It’s essential that you integrate strong security measures in your enterprise, and that each and every employee makes cybersecurity a top priority.

If you want to run a quick security audit on your existing security practices, let us know and we’ll help you ensure that you are well-protected from unauthorized data access and other cyber threats.

The New Normal Ep2: Funny Moments with Tyson and Angie of BurstIQ

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Here are some funny moments that we captured from episode two of The New Normal! We take pride in not taking our selves too seriously over here at The New Normal. I hope enjoy this blooper reel as much as we do.

To listen to the full episode click here.

Subscribe on YouTube for more content!

If you want to learn more about the companies featured in the video click below:

BurstIQ

Cypress Data Defense

Lark Security

7 Mobile App Security Best Practices Developers Should Follow

Thu, 04 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

The mobile ecosystem is feature-rich with apps that have the ability to control everything - even the heating and lighting in your house in real-time. Mobile apps are constantly evolving and it’s imperative that mobile app developers not only look for ways to build feature-rich apps but also make them secure.

Mobile app security has quickly become one of the top concerns for many businesses as data residing within the app can pave the way for attackers. They can leverage information and gain access to unauthorized sensitive data and potentially breach the enterprise network.

Developers need to be extra cautious and follow mobile app security best practices to build secure apps. These include clearing the cache, using encryption algorithms and tamper-detection mechanisms, securing local storage, and many others.

7 Mobile App Security Best Practices For Developers

Here is a list of some of the top mobile app security best practices that developers should follow while building and maintaining a mobile application:

1. Use Certificate Pinning

Certificate pinning is an excellent way to ensure your highly sensitive information such as credentials, personally identifiable information (PII) of users, logic code of the mobile application, confidential business data, and much more are transported securely over the network.

Certificate pinning is a proven method to defend against security vulnerabilities such as compromised CAs, man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. Particularly, attackers can trick users into installing malicious data or a self-signed certificate on a mobile device.

Although traditional certificate validation (without certificate pinning) protects mobile apps from various types of MITM attacks, it doesn’t guarantee protection from all of them.

Certificate pinning helps to ensure that your mobile app only talks to your known trusted server with its own known and trusted certificate. If a user installs a malicious certificate, the mobile application can prevent the interception of its network traffic. This will protect the user’s data from being exposed to the attacker.

2. Secure Storage Options / Encrypt Data

Encryption is the process of converting your data into a form that is unreadable by anyone without a decryption key. It is an efficient method to save data from being stolen or used in a malicious way.

To secure stored data on your mobile app, it needs to be protected from accidental destruction, unauthorized access, and malware or infection.

What happens if your stored app data is not secure?

Attackers can run an automated script or inject malicious code to infiltrate the local memory by using the file manager or different addresses in the mobile app. They can gain access to sensitive data such as confidential information, bank account details, credentials, social security numbers, and much more.

Therefore, it’s important that your stored data is adequately protected. You can use encryption to secure your files so that they can be read-only after a corresponding key has deciphered it.

Also, don’t just implement encryption for data storage, but also make sure that all sensitive transactions within the mobile app are encrypted.

3. Secure Your API Keys

API keys are often needed when accessing data from different services. For instance, they can be used for services like Navigation with Google Maps or while using the Google search engine.

Basically, API keys enable the system to determine whether a user is an authorized user of the particular service. It's important to safely store these API keys to protect them from unauthorized users who may want to gain access to the internal systems and networks of a mobile app.

How can you securely store APIs?

In this instance, API keys should have a higher level of security and protection, which is possible when they are stored on the server side.

If the mobile application does not have a server side, these keys can be securely stored within the mobile app. In such cases, the keys are coded and encrypted with only a limited level of access.

4. Secure Your APIs

Unauthorized or loosely coded APIs can unintentionally grant access privileges to an attacker which can further cause a data breach or loss. Ensure that all of your APIs require authentication and enforce authorization.

How can you secure your APIs?

Implement the principle of least privilege (POLP) to ensure authorized users can only access the data they need to complete their tasks.

Experts also recommend that the best way to protect your mobile app from malicious users is to validate all input data coming from the mobile device and outside network. Assume that anything can be malicious code or can harm the mobile application.

5. Use Tamper-Detection Technologies

Mobile app developers should deploy tamper-detection technologies that can quickly detect and set off alarms if anyone tries to tamper with your mobile app’s code or inject malicious data into it.

Use digital signatures, checksums, and other validation methods to help detect tampering in your mobile app. If an attacker tried to manipulate the mobile app, the app would validate the checksum and this could identify and prevent illegitimate execution.

While these technologies are not foolproof, they definitely increase the amount of time and effort an attacker will spend to breach the app.

Moreover, mobile applications that have tamper-detection capabilities can notify administrators.

What can you do if tampering is detected?

This is very subjective and varies from one mobile app to another. Reporting these situations to the server is a good idea so that you can assess the severity and scale of the issue and take appropriate action.

6. Manage Vulnerabilities in Your Dependencies

Mobile applications are vulnerable to several security risks. If you do not maintain their components, then they can easily become the target of exploitation from attackers and other malicious users.

The best way to protect your mobile app is to manage vulnerabilities in your dependencies and follow strong security policies and practices to mitigate risks in the app.

Here are some of the most popular vulnerability database:

CVEDetails: This is a database of security issues and vulnerabilities acquired from various other sources. Each vulnerability has a CVE score that determines its severity and impact.
National Vulnerability Database (NVD): This is the U.S. government repository of various standards-based vulnerability management data.

Apart from these, you can also keep yourself updated with the latest information on cybersecurity from our blog. We regularly update and publish blog posts on cybersecurity risks and ways to mitigate them.

Further, make sure that you have proper mitigation controls to address application security risks and vulnerabilities that might crop up in your mobile app.

7. Write Secure Code

Code is one of the most vulnerable features of any mobile app. Often developers have to follow rigorous and quick deployment processes that tend to impact the security of a mobile app.

Yes, this is what it’s all about.

Secure code is a key component of building a secure mobile app. As much as quick deployments are important in today’s market, it’s also essential to address security challenges early in the development process.

How can you write secure code for a mobile app?

One of the best ways to implement mobile app security is to regularly hold training for mobile developers to teach them specifically about secure code development.

Additionally, having a secure software development lifecycle (SDLC) during which the software is tested for various security vulnerabilities from early in the development process helps identify and mitigate security risks in a timely manner.

Mobile app developers should also implement a combination of both manual security testing and automated security testing to detect and mitigate security vulnerabilities that might be present in the code. This will give them a comprehensive understanding of how secure the code really is and what can they modify to strengthen application security.

Final Thoughts

These are some of the mobile app security best practices that developers should follow to provide critical endpoint security to apps. In recent years, mobile application security has proven its importance and with increasing competition, it’s necessary for businesses to not just focus on building a user-friendly UI but ensuring that the mobile app is secure.

Regardless of the target audience for your mobile app, be it an app used within your organization for internal functions or an app for your customers, it has to be built in a secure way to prevent malicious users from launching cybersecurity attacks. If you want to know more about cybersecurity, check out our blog for more information.

Mobile App Security Vulnerabilities and How to Mitigate Them

Thu, 04 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

With the rapid adoption and increased mobile app usage globally, it shouldn’t be a surprise that hackers are increasingly targeting mobile apps. A report found that 1 in every 36 mobile devices has high-risk apps installed.

These insecure apps could lead to severe data breaches and have devastating consequences for both the user and the organization.

Integrating mobile app security into your cybersecurity strategy is important to protect your users and the trust they have established. A single data breach compromising their personal data could be detrimental to your relationship with them. This could not only affect your customer retention rate, but also impact your acquisition rates, sales, and finally revenue.

To get a better understanding of what the top mobile app security vulnerabilities are that exist today and how can you mitigate them, check out the infographic below:

The New Normal Ep3: Kyle Shannon Returns to announce his new project Live Local!

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Welcome to the third episode of The New Normal!

In this episode, we are joined by our first repeat offender Kyle Shannon CEO of Storyvine! Kyle joins the show to announce his new project Live Local with 9news to help local companies promote thier businesses in these new and trying times. To sign up to advirtise your business click here. We also catch up on what else he has seen change in his new normal since we last spoke.

This is one of our most informative conversations yet!

Subscribe on YouTube for future episodes. Watch out we will have another episode of The New Normal in a couple weeks!

If you want to learn more about the companies featured on the episode here are the links to their websites:

Storyvine

Cypress Data Defense

Lark Security

The New Normal Ep4: Sumanth Channabasappa talks everything from running a VC Firm to his Standup Comedy Group!

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Welcome to the fourth episode of The New Normal!

In this episode, we are joined by Sumanth Channabasappa Cheif Architect at The Center, and Venture Partner at 3 Lines Venture Fund. Sumanth was quite the entertaining guest and we hope to have him back soon! Please listen in to learn all about his different projects and passions.

Subscribe on YouTube for future episodes. Watch out we will have another episode of The New Normal in a couple weeks!

If you want to learn more about the companies featured on the episode here are the links to their websites:

How to Improve Your DevOps Test Automation Strategy

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Test automation strategies have strengthened business models by transforming lengthy and labor-intensive testing processes into streamlined automated processes. Companies are adding automation security testing as an integral part of the development process in their DevOps strategies.

A robust test automation suite enables organizations to validate functionality and simple security test cases with every execution of the DevOps pipeline. Companies can focus more on day-to-day activities and ensure that teams work more efficiently without investing much time into repetitive tasks.

But what if you already have an existing DevOps test automation strategy? How do you ensure that your DevOps testing strategy is sufficient to maintain good security in your applications?

Well, there are several ways you can create and implement an ideal DevOps test automation strategy that helps you with early identification of vulnerabilities and weaknesses of the application.

5 Ways to Improve Your DevOps Test Automation Strategy

In this article, we will explain the key points to building a reliable DevOps security test automation strategy that will help you tighten your applications’ security:

1. Apply the Right Test Automation Framework

Frameworks are a primary element of test automation strategies. They provide reusable components that can be used to create custom automation tests by different teams.

A well-built testing automation suite can serve as a critical asset to your organization and an integral part of DevOps. It promotes faster delivery, early detection of issues, and eases the process of continuous updates and execution.

You can use open-source software or commercial software to build test suites that fit your team’s needs. Both open-source and commercial software for DevOps testing strategies have their fair share of pros and cons.

For instance, you can find massive support communities for troubleshooting, learning, support, and updates while working with open-source software such as Selenium or OWASP ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy).

On the other hand, commercial software like Ranorex will provide you with an end-to-end space for easy building, implementing, and executing your automated test suites, with a dedicated support mechanism in case you run into issues.

Open source tools for DevOps such as Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) are widely used to identify security issues pertinent to your web applications while it is in the development and software testing phase.

OWASP ZAP is also considered to be a great automation security tool that can be used for manual security testing by experienced testers.

Frameworks for your test automation strategy allow you to focus on user value, instead of just technology. It empowers the team to look beyond the technical implementation of an application and serve the end-user in a much better way. Properly implemented test automation frameworks cogently reduce test suite maintenance costs during DevOps.

2: Understand the Application’s Needs

Assimilating the test automation requirements, and selecting the right set of tools to implement isn’t enough for effective DevOps. It is essential to understand every element within the user environment of the app such as its configurations, framework, end-user goal, security parameters, etc.

The more you understand the application, the easier it will be for you to choose the right automation tools needed for your application’s security testing during DevOps.

If an automation tool helps with the technical aspect of an app but interferes with the end-user experience, then you may want to consider a different tool.

Thus, it is essential for the team handling test automation for DevOps to know the entire application so that they can choose an ideal and efficient automation security tool.

By considering various aspects of the application, the team will be able to understand the application not just from a technical perspective but also from the customer’s point of view.

For example, for financial service applications, security should be of utmost priority. The automation testing team should then focus on creating robust strategies that support the overall security of the application such as verifying the integrity of transaction details and negative test cases to ensure users cannot see another user’s account details, etc.

For this, organizations should encourage participation from both the development and automation testing teams.

In DevOps testing, continuous delivery from the development team enables the automation testing team to be a part of each module. It helps in the creation of much better and seamless DevOps testing strategies that align with the project development.

By working closely with the development team, the automation testing team is able to update test cases that meet the latest functionality of the application without much hassle or delay. They integrate the latest code into their test cases to run quick security tests, and ensure early identification and remediation of potential threats and vulnerabilities.

Keeping the automation testing team in the loop about every update regarding the application can result in better DevOps testing. It will not only improve the software testing process but also promote smooth communication flow between different teams.

3: Be Selective with Your DevOps Test Cases

The primary motivation for implementing DevOps automation test strategy is to get coverage of easy security issues and leave more complex ones to the security team.

However, with the plethora of code, it often becomes difficult to successfully approach every DevOps test case within the application using only automated security testing. Thus, it is important to determine the test cases that need to be automated first. There are many things that can be considered such as how frequently will the DevOps test cases need to be run, if it requires large amounts of data, is there a lot of logic required, etc.

Automated testing has ample benefits, especially for repetitive test cases and continuous delivery. Whereas manual testing serves as a better alternative for test cases that are more complex or performed only a few times.

We will talk about these considerations for DevOps next to help you understand and prioritize your test cases.

To get the maximum benefit from your software testing strategies, you should automate tests that are:

Repetitive in nature and run frequently
Prone to manual errors
Expensive and time-consuming if performed manually
Labor intensive and require a heavy resource investment

You can also leverage test automation for test cases that:

Run on various software or hardware platforms and configurations
Require large amounts of data

4: Keep Your DevOps Test Cases Small

Although some quality analysts aim at building large test cases to address complex code structures, keeping your test cases small can be more beneficial.

When you create small test cases, you will be able to identify each test explicitly, and set a clear definition of the expected outcome. Then you will know exactly what failed or succeeded. The test cases will be much simpler and easier to understand.

If the development team needs to address a particular test case, it won’t take long for them to understand what the test case holds.

Moreover, instead of going through the entire documentation, you’ll be able to identify test cases by merely looking at them whenever required.

While it is important to keep your test cases small, it is also essential to consider negative test cases. For example, you should not be able to access another user’s data with their credentials.

Security teams often create negative test cases to ensure better software security, where a user should not be able to access another user’s data or exploit input validation.

This helps check for invalid data or unexpected user behavior in your DevOps strategy. For example, if a username consists of only alphabetical characters, and you input a numeric value, the system should prompt you to correctly enter the input value again.

Smaller test cases in DevOps test automation strategies also tend to closely adhere to the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP). The SRP states that every module or class in a program should be responsible for only one piece of that program’s functionality.

Therefore, smaller test cases for DevOps testing focus on precise validation that reduces the possibility of vulnerabilities in an application. It encourages better learning and understanding across various teams to work cohesively.

5: Maintain Flexibility with Non-UI-Dependent Test Cases

Keep in mind that your DevOps testing strategy needs to be able to accommodate changes.

Ensure that your test cases are flexible and able to adapt to new changes in the UI and are feasible for future use.

One of the most reliable ways to create easy yet powerful DevOps test cases is to write them in action terms that are supported by backend functions.

Rather than using scripting languages like JScript, use keyword-based tests that eliminate the need to depend on UI elements that might change as the development progresses with time.

This is specifically for a DevOps test automation strategy where constant changes and updates are made in the applications.

Final Thoughts

DevOps isn’t just confined within technical implementation and execution, it goes beyond that to align with the needs of your business. Incorporating the right set of tools and frameworks into your test automation strategy can improve your software development process.

Any time invested in creating a DevOps test automation strategy is time well spent. Automation technology can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire security testing procedure. The key is to analyze and create test cases that are sustainable and will stay relevant as the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) progresses.

Remember that improper test automation strategies can have a drastic impact on your entire DevOps testing strategy. Therefore, it is recommended that you work with knowledgeable professionals to build and implement a strong DevOps test automation strategy, one which lasts for a long period and is nearly unaffected by frequent code changes.

Security Authentication vs. Authorization: What You Need to Know

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Software terminologies can be confusing. Many words may sound similar but are different aspects of computer security and networking, and sometimes, it’s hard to tell them apart.

With respect to security systems, the confusion with the terms “authentication” and “authorization” are a classic example.

They are often incorrectly used interchangeably.

While they might sound similar, they are two entirely distinct security concepts.

Developers integrate strong authentication and authorization processes to secure their application from malicious actors.

There are millions of web applications and services that require authentication to work properly, as most of their services/intents depend upon the action of their users: blogs, forums, shopping carts, collaborative tools, and subscription-based content/services.

However, it’s not the same as authorization.

Security Authentication vs. Authorization: What’s The Difference?

How, exactly, are security authentication and authorization different?

In this section, we will take a closer look at both security authentication and authorization.

What is Authentication?

Authentication is asserting and proving one’s identity. My identification is “joe_user” (userID) and I can prove I’m Joe because I know Joe’s password (that no one else knows).

Authentication is the process of validating a user’s identity to grant them access to a system or network. It determines the right of a user to access resources such as services, data servers, networks, databases, files, etc.

How does a web application provide authentication to users?

Most applications feature a login page where users have to enter their credentials to prove their identity. Those credentials may consist of their user ID, username, email, or phone number and the password associated with it.

If the credentials provided by the user match the data stored in the application’s database, the user is authenticated and granted access to the application.

Which Are the Common Authentication Methods?

There are several ways to perform authentication, including one-time passwords, biometrics, authentication apps, hardware tokens, software tokens, and many others.

One of the most common ways for authentication is passwords - if a user enters the correct password, the system checks the credentials and grants access to the user.

However, passwords are often targeted by hackers and are vulnerable to cyberattacks, such as brute force attacks, data breaches, man-in-the-middle attacks, and password cracking.

For this reason, businesses often use other security methods such as two-factor or multi-factor authentication (2FA/MFA) to strengthen security beyond passwords.

In multi-factor authentication, the system may require the successful verification of more than one factor before granting access to the user.

What is Authorization?

Once a user is authenticated, the application knows who you are. Authorization then is determining what that user can do within the application (vertical authorization, e.g., does the user have administrator rights or are they a normal user?) and what data do they have access to? (horizontal authorization, Joe User should not be able to access Mary Smith’s data).

Authorization is the process of giving necessary privileges to the user to access specific resources such as files, databases, locations, funds, files, information, almost anything within an application. In simple terms, authorization evaluates a user’s ability to access the system and up to what extent.

According to the 2019 Global Data Risk Report, nearly 53% of companies found over 1,000 sensitive files open to every employee.

To maintain strong security, authorization must take place after authentication - where the system validates the user’s identity before it grants access according to their privileges.

For instance, you might want to allow administrators to view sensitive information but limit third-party suppliers from accessing this sensitive data. Authorization is often used interchangeably with user access control and user privilege.

Which Are the Different Approaches For Authorization?

When it comes to authorization, you can take different approaches to it. What’s best for you depends on your needs.

Different approaches to authorization include:

Token-based: Users are granted a token that stipulates what privileges the user is granted and what data they have access to where the token is cryptographically signed.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Users are identified as being in a role that stipulates what privileges they have. Additionally, their user ID would restrict what data they have access to.
Access Control Lists (ACL): An ACL specifies which users have access to particular resources. For instance, if a user wants to access a specific file or folder, their username or details should be mentioned in the ACL in order to be able to access certain data.

Businesses often assign privileges and ACLs to users in batches, they might implement “groups” and “roles”, two features that enable the categorization of users and assign access controls and privileges to them based on their organizational standing and job functions.

Usually, once an authenticated user has access to their account, they are permitted to perform all operations that they’re authorized to do.

For example, once you log in to your email account, you can view all of your emails, reply to them, delete them, categorize them, modify your personal information, and do other email-related tasks.

However, if a user wishes to perform a particularly sensitive operation, they might need to take additional steps to authorize the request.

For instance, if a user is trying to make a payment, they might have to re-enter their password, or repeat the authentication process, to validate their identity again.

In secure environments, some applications might use such precautionary authorization methods if they observe unusual user behavior, like an IP address, or an unusual time of login, or an attempt to make a high-value transaction.

This is to ensure that only authorized users have access to their account and prove that their account hasn’t been hijacked or compromised by a malicious actor.

Authentication vs. Authorization: An Example

Still not clear about the differences between authentication and authorization?

A real-world example can help you understand the differences between authentication and authorization better.

Let’s say, for instance, you want to access your bank account online.

If you need to login to your banking application, you must have the credentials for your account. If you enter the correct username and password, you can gain access to your account. The application only grants access to a user who has the correct credentials.

This is authentication.

If you forgot your password, they may ask you some security questions that only you know, or they may email you a password reset token.

This is also authentication.

Once you have successfully logged in your user account, you can access your profile, download your bank statement, make transactions, and do many other banking-related activities. All of these activities are authorized. You are granted the privilege to perform them.

Now, let’s suppose you want to access a premium service on your account. While you can gain access to your account (authentication) and avail services, you might not be allowed (authorized) to access premium services.

In such cases, the application will check your user privileges in the back-end database and only allow you to use them if you have the right to access those premium services.

Takeaways

Authentication and authorization are two strong pillars of cybersecurity that protect data from potential cyberattacks.

Authentication is the process of verifying if a user is who they claim to be by checking their credentials. Authorization is the method of checking the privileges of a user and granting access to only specific resources.

In a nutshell, both authentication and authorization are crucial but one is not a substitute for the other.

Think of authentication and authorization as complementary systems, and you need both.

Ideally, you should implement authentication and authorization in your security systems. That’s the best way to ensure that your systems and networks are properly secured.

If you want to conduct a cybersecurity audit or a code review, get in touch with us.

How to Perform Threat Modeling & Security Analysis in 5 Steps

Tue, 26 May 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Want to learn how to perform threat modeling?

Then, you are in the right place.

But before that, let us quickly discuss why it is important to perform threat modeling and security analysis.

Almost all software systems face a variety of threats today, and the number of cyberattacks continues to rise as the technology matures. In the second quarter of 2018, malware exploiting software vulnerabilities grew 151 percent, according to a report.

Security breaches can occur due to internal or external entities, and they can have devastating consequences. These attacks may leak sensitive data of your organization or disable your system completely, which may even lead to complete loss of data.

How can you protect your data from being stolen or prevent malicious attacks on your devices?

One way to start is by performing threat modeling, a process that helps you analyze your environment, identify potential vulnerabilities and threats, and create the proper security requirements you need to address those threats.

What is the Right Level of Security for Your Device and How Can Threat Modeling Help You Achieve It?

To design-in security, it is recommended that developers and manufacturers analyze the operating environment to determine how each device could be attacked and then document it.

This process of understanding and documenting security requirements is known as Threat Modeling and Security Analysis (TMSA).

But how can performing Threat Modeling and Security Analysis help you secure your device against cybersecurity attacks?

It can help you analyze your device and understand:

How robust does your security need to be?
What preventive measures should you take to avoid security issues?
What potential threats could impact your device?

A Threat Modeling and Security Analysis (TMSA) highlights critical issues and challenges that you should consider while implementing security to protect your product or device.

It prompts you to consider critical questions such as:

What are the potential threats to your device?
How severe are those threats?
Is your device in compliance with security standards?
What are the potential vulnerabilities that could put your device at risk of a security breach?
What countermeasures could you implement to protect your device?

Steps to Perform Threat Modeling

Here is a step-by-step process that will help you understand how you can perform a Threat Modeling and Security Analysis to determine your security requirements.

Step 1: Identify the Use Case, Assets to Protect, and External Entities

The first step to perform threat modeling is to identify a use case, which is the system or device that is the subject of your security assessment. By doing so, you will have an idea of what device or system needs to be analyzed further.

Since attackers may target your device to steal important data or to have it act maliciously, you need to identify the assets that hold sensitive information or are most likely to be attacked.

For instance, if you have a smart speaker, then you may want to protect the following assets:

Log-in credentials
Network communication
Firmware
Event logs
Certificates and unique keys
System configurations (to secure your IP address)
Device resources (such as speakers, microphone array, battery, storage, debug interface, network bandwidth, and computing power)

There might be many different assets in your device, but what’s important is that you focus on securing assets that hold valuable data and are critical to your organization and customers.

Moreover, to identify and understand potential threats that might impact your device, you need to determine external entities and users who interact with the device.

That may include legitimate users, such as the virtual system administrator or the owner of the device. But it should also extend to identify potential adversaries or attackers attempting to gain access to the device.

Once you’ve identified these, it’s time to move on to the next step of performing threat modeling.

Step 2: Identify Trust Zones, Potential Adversaries, and Threats

In this step of performing threat modeling, you have to identify trust zones and corresponding entry-exit points. By using this information, you can develop data flow diagrams along with privilege boundaries that will help you define the approach for input data validation, user authentication, and error handling.

Additionally, you need to create an adversary-based threat model to help you identify potential adversaries and attackers who may be trying to exploit or attack your device.

Usually, an adversary-based threat model has four categories of attackers:

Network attacker: This type of attacker may conduct network attacks such as man-in-the-middle attacks, where the attacker intercepts communication between two parties.
Malicious insider attacker: These attackers may be your employees, a third-party vendor, or any individual who has access to your device or network.
Remote software attacker: Most attackers fall into this category and try to breach security software by introducing malicious scripts/code or a virus to steal data or gain control of the device/network.
Advanced hardware attacker: These attackers usually have advanced resources and require physical access to the device. They often deploy sophisticated attacks with the help of specialized equipment, such as microscopy probing or ion-beam lithography.

By this point, you should have identified what you need to protect and what potential adversaries could lead to a security breach.

Next, you should identify potential vulnerabilities, including software, physical devices, development lifecycles, and communication that could act as entry points into your device and allow attackers to enter your system.

What do these vulnerabilities include?

These vulnerabilities may include excessive user access privileges, weak password policies, absence of Web Application Firewall (WAF), broken authentication, insecure cryptographic storage, lack of security guidelines, or security misconfigurations.

Once you have identified potential vulnerabilities, you can implement a threat model against each entry point to determine security threats.

But how can you design the right level of security required to protect your device against these threats?

After identifying potential security threats, you will need to consider assessing the severity of each threat or attack and allocate your resources appropriately.

You can use a common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) to evaluate the impact of the threats. It uses scores between zero to 10 to help you understand how an attack would affect your device.

For instance, if the CVSS score for a threat is 9, then you should focus your resources and attention on it as its impact would be severe.

By doing so, you will be able to build the right level of security into your device.

Step 3: Determine High-Level Security Objectives to Address Potential Threats

In this step of how to perform threat modeling, you have to establish security objectives that focus on maintaining the following security elements:

Confidentiality
Availability
Integrity
Secure Development Lifecycle
Authenticity
Non-Repudiation

The type of attack determines the risk to each of these security elements.

For instance, you can determine that a tampering attack may impact the integrity of your device, while a spoofing attack may impact the authenticity of your device.

Once you have assessed the potential threats and their severity, you will be able to determine what countermeasures you need to employ to combat those threats and how you can address them appropriately.

Step 4: Define Security Requirements for Each Security Objective Clearly

Since each threat poses a different risk to high-level security objectives, you need to analyze and create specific, actionable security requirements that will directly address those threats.

For instance, to secure identities, you should:

Maintain roles, trusted communication channels, and authorization
Implement least privilege user access
Set failure threshold limits
Secure remote management

Step 5: Create a Document to Store All Relevant Information

Once you have gathered all the requisite information needed to set security requirements for your system, create a threat modeling document that stores this information accurately.

What should you include in this document?

The document should include separate tables that list the assets that you need to protect, potential adversaries and threats, countermeasures you need to take, and security requirements.

It should be well-structured and have clear and concise information to help you see the potential severity of an attack and how you can address each threat.

A well-maintained document can help you efficiently perform Threat Modeling and Security Analysis (TMSA).

Key Takeaways from This Guide on How to Perform Threat Modeling

Now that you know more about threat modeling and how to perform it, get started with your TMSA documentation. Remember, you need to identify potential vulnerabilities along with security requirements that will help protect your system against attackers and threats.

Do you have any more questions on how to perform threat modeling? Please get in touch with our security experts.

How to Do Security Testing Manually: 12 Effective Ways

Mon, 25 May 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Cybersecurity attacks are becoming more prominent for businesses around the world. With evolving attacks, about 68% of business leaders feel their cybersecurity risks are growing.

The need for security testing can no longer be overlooked.

While some companies rely on a handful of automated security testing tools and processes to maintain security compliance, others leverage both automated testing as well as manual security testing to ensure their software is thoroughly tested and secure.

There are many ways to do security testing manually to test the security posture of your application. Before we dive into them, let’s take a closer look at why you should do security testing manually.

Why Should You Do Security Testing Manually?

Even with rapid improvements in automation technology, there are still many elements that need human attention to verify or to accurately determine potential web security vulnerabilities in an application.

Some potential vulnerabilities such as business logic issues or cryptographic issues, require a human to verify the vulnerability.

That’s why you need to do security testing manually.

Manual security testers often use a combination of handpicked security testing software and tools that are best suited to evaluate their application. These may include customized scripts and automated scanning tools.

Advanced techniques to do security testing manually involve precise test cases such as checking user controls, evaluating the encryption capabilities, and thorough analysis to discover the nested vulnerabilities within an application.

Doing security testing manually doesn’t imply that you can not use automation. Rather, security experts can leverage automation technology to find patterns or other clues that might uncover important information about the application’s vulnerabilities.

The primary goal of manual security testing is to discover weaknesses and potential vulnerabilities in an application that might not be understood or revealed completely by automated security testing alone.

Regardless of the number of automated testing software and tools one might use, it is critical to manually analyze software behavior to ensure its integrity, confidentiality, and availability principles are not being violated.

Techniques to Help You Do Security Testing Manually

You can do security testing manually when any weakness in the application security needs a real, human judgment call. There is an array of manual security testing techniques that can help you assess your applications and systems to ensure they are secure.

Here are some of the most effective and efficient ways on how to do security testing manually:

1. Monitor Access Control Management

Be it a web application or a computer, access control is a critical aspect that helps protect your application security or system from being exploited by attackers or insider threats.

Access control management can be categorized into two parts:

Authentication - Who are you?
Authorization - What can you do and what information do you have access to?

For instance, an employee should only have access to information that is required to perform his/her job.

By implementing access control, you can ensure that only authorized users can access data or a system.

In order to manually test this, the tester should create several user accounts with different roles.

Then the tester should attempt to access applications or systems by using these accounts and verify that every user account has access only to its own forms, screens, accounts, menus, and modules. The tester can then test requests made by one user/role in the session of a different user/role.

If the tester is able to login to an application with a disabled account, he/she can document the application security issue.

What’s more?

A user with restricted or lower access privileges should not be able to gain access to sensitive information or high privilege data.

You should also manually test for password quality rules, default logins, password recovery, password changes, web security question/answer, logout functionality, etc.

Similarly, authorization tests should also include a test for horizontal access control problems, missing authorization, path reversal, etc.

2. Dynamic Analysis (Penetration Testing)

Penetration testing, or a pen test, is a software testing technique that uses controlled cyber-attacks to target a running system to determine vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers.

Manual penetration testing of a running system consists of the following steps:

Data Collection - The first step of conducting manual penetration testing is collecting data such as table names, databases, information about third-party plugins, software configurations, etc. It can either be done manually or by using testing tools (such as webpage source code analysis) that are freely available online.
Vulnerability Assessment - Once the data is collected, the software penetration testing team evaluates it to determine security risks or vulnerabilities that could put the system at risk of a security attack.
Launch Simulated Attacks - The penetration testing team launches controlled attacks on the target system to explore more vulnerabilities and understand how they can prevent attacks.
Report Preparation - After the system has been targeted and assessed completely for potential vulnerabilities, the software testing team creates a report that outlines the discoveries of the test, and the measures required to protect the system.

This is the process you need to follow when you want to do penetration testing manually to enhance the security of a system.

3. Static Analysis (Static Code Analysis)

Another popular method of manual security testing is static code analysis. It is usually performed as a part of white-box testing, also known as a Code Review, and carried out to highlight potential vulnerabilities within the “static” (non-running) source code.

Static code analysis uses techniques such as data flow analysis and taint analysis to determine vulnerabilities associated with a system.

It is conducted by manual testers who understand the operating environment the application is running in and the users that use the application. These testers know the overall purpose of the application as well as the purpose of individual functions.

They apply this knowledge to static analysis tools that examine the source code, documentation, and even the executables, to find vulnerabilities without actually running the code.

Static analysis tools vary greatly in purpose and scope, ranging from code styling enforcement to compiler-level checks for logical errors and much more.

Put simply, static code analysis helps you maintain secure code without having to actually run the code.

4. Check Server Access Controls

Web applications have multiple user access points that provide enough access to fulfill users’ requests, but they must maintain security to avoid data breaches or attacks.

How can testers check server access controls?

Testers should ensure that all intra-network and inter-network access points to the application are by expected machines (IPs), applications, and users and that all access is strictly controlled.

To verify if an open access point is sufficiently restricted, the tester should try to access these points from various machines having both untrusted and trusted IP addresses.

Additionally, a variety of real-time transactions should be performed in bulk to check the application’s performance under load conditions.

While doing security testing manually, the tester should also check if the open access points in the application allow specific actions by the users in a secure way.

For instance, the tester may upload a file exceeding the maximum permitted file size, try to upload a restricted file type, or download data from a restricted site to check if the application is allowing such actions.

The goal of checking server access controls is to ensure that while users are able to use the application, the application is secure from potential attacks.

5. Ingress/Egress/Entry Points

Testers often check ingress and egress network points to ensure that no unauthorized networks can send traffic or information to the host network and vice-versa.

What are ingress and egress points?

Ingress traffic consists of all the network traffic and data communications originating from external networks that are directed towards a node in the host network. On the other hand, egress traffic consists of all traffic originating from within the network and targeted towards an external network.

These entry points in a network can be easily checked via manual security testing methods such as trying to send data from a restricted network to the host network and check if it is allowing the traffic and accepting data.

A tester may even send sensitive data or confidential information from the host network to an authorized external network to check if the egress points are secured.

Ingress and egress filtering allows networks to interact with one another while maintaining security standards and restricting the sharing of sensitive data to unauthorized networks.

6. Session Management

When you do security testing manually, you should perform session management tests to check if the application is handling sessions properly.

To ensure that your application has proper session management, check the session expiration after a particular idle time, session termination after login and log out, session termination after maximum lifetime, check for session duration and session cookie scope, etc.

7. Password Management

One of the most productive security testing techniques that you can use while doing testing manually is password management. This refers to the various methods used to discover passwords and access user accounts or systems.

How can you test password management?

If the web application or system does not enforce stringent password policies, (for example, with numerics, special characters, or passphrases), it may be quite easy to brute force passwords and access the account.

Additionally, passwords that are not stored in an encrypted format are more vulnerable to being stolen and used directly. Attackers may use different methods to steal the information stored in the database such as SQL Injection.

Even if passwords are stored in a hashed format, once they are retrieved, they can be cracked using password cracking tools such as Brutus, RainbowCrack, or by manually guessing username/password combinations.

8. Brute-Force Attacks

Another way on how to do security testing manually is by using brute-force attacks.

Brute-force attacks rely on guessing different combinations of a targeted password until the correct password is discovered.

Attackers use brute-force attacks to gain access to sensitive information such as personal identification numbers, passphrases, passwords, or usernames to carry out identity theft, redirect domains to sites with malicious content, or other malicious activities.

This method is also widely used by application security testers to test application security, and more specifically, evaluate the strength of the application’s encryption.

For instance, a tester should attempt to login to accounts with invalid passwords, and ideally, the system should block the user after a limited number of failed multiple login attempts.

Moreover, if the login attempts are made from an unknown device or suspicious network, the application should ask for multiple-factor authentication which might consist of one-time passwords sent to the verified email address or contact number of the user, or a security question set by the user.

9. SQL Injection (SQLi)

SQL Injection is a code injection technique used to inject malicious SQL statements into an application to modify or extract data stored in databases.

It is one of the most dangerous, frequent, and oldest web application vulnerabilities. It can affect any web application that uses SQL databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, or others.

How can you prevent SQL Injection attacks?

Manual testers check the SQL injection entry points to identify if it can be exploited by a SQL injection attack. They identify and test the database code in which direct MySQL queries are performed on the database by accepting certain user inputs.

For instance, the application should be able to accept a single quote (‘) in an input field. But if the application throws a database error to the tester, it means that the user input has been inserted in some query to the database and it has been executed.

The SQL query error message shown on the browser may lead the attacker to crash the entire application or help them to extract data like usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, etc.

10. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)

In addition to SQL Injection attacks, testers also check the web application for Cross-Site Scripting (i.e XSS) in manual security testing. It is a client-side injection attack where the attacker aims to execute malicious scripts in the victim’s browser.

These malicious scripts can perform a variety of functions such as send the victim’s login credentials or session token to the attacker, log their keystrokes, or perform arbitrary actions on behalf of the victim.

During manual testing, testers must ensure that the input fields do not trust unvalidated user input, and must properly encode the output of these fields if they are included in a server response.

Moreover, the primary way to protect your application from XSS injection attack is by applying proper input and output encoding.

11. URL Manipulation

URL manipulation is another technique through which attackers exploit applications. It is the process of modifying the parameters of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for malicious purposes by an attacker.

How can you protect your application from URL manipulation?

Manual testers should verify whether or not the application allows sensitive information in the query string. These types of attacks occur when the application uses the HTTP GET method to transfer information between the server and the client.

When a URL-based input is given to an application, it passes this information through the parameters in the query string. The tester may change a parameter value in the query string to verify whether the server accepts that value.

User information is passed through HTTP GET requests to the server to fetch data or make requests. If the tester is able to manipulate input variables passed through this GET request to the server, they can get access to unauthorized information.

12. Specify High-Risk Functions

Businesses deal with a lot of data on an everyday basis. There are thousands of business functionalities that require file upload/download, giving user access privilege to employees, sharing data with third-party contractors, and many other activities that may have potential vulnerabilities.

You need to identify high-risk functions to ensure that better security measures are implemented for particular activities such as restricting unwanted or malicious file uploads/downloads.

If your application deals with any sensitive data, you should manually check the application for injection vulnerabilities, password guessing, buffer overflows, insecure cryptographic storage, etc.

Use These Ways to Do Security Testing Manually

While automated security testing has ample benefits, it is not enough to ensure that an application is completely secure.

Businesses must conduct manual security tests to ensure that there are no potential weaknesses or vulnerabilities in an application that could be exploited by an attacker.

By conducting proper security tests manually, companies can detect business flaws and injection vulnerabilities that might not be clearly evident from automated security tests.

Ready to get started? You can use the effective manual security testing techniques above while doing security testing manually.

The New Normal Ep1: Funny Moments with Kyle Shannon CEO of Storyvine

Thu, 21 May 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Here are some funny moments that we captured from episode one of The New Normal! In addition to a few laughs, CEO of Storyvine, Kyle Shannon tells us about his innovative storytelling tool, and how he came about starting the company years back.

To listen to the full episode click here.

Subscribe on YouTube for more content!

If you want to learn more about the companies featured in the video click below:

Storyvine

Cypress Data Defense

Lark Security

The New Normal Ep2 Feat: BurstIQ

Fri, 15 May 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Welcome to the second episode of The New Normal!

In this episode, our panel talks to Tyson Henry CTO, and Angie Gallagher Director of Business Development at BurstIQ The group talks about what they miss professionally, and personally about life before the lockdown. They also talk about how their business's are impacting the fight against COVID-19. Burst IQ is doing some very innovative work in the blockchain space that was very interesting to learn about!

Our panelist were enjoying the drink of the week during this episode! We told a story about how an iced tea company changed their name to be blockchain related so we figured why not drink long island iced teas for the drink of the week!

Drink of the week:

Recipe:

First you'll need these ingrediants vodka, tequila, light rum, triple sec, gin, and a splash of your cola of choice.

Next add all ingredients into highball glass filled with ice. Stir gently. Garnish with lemon spiral. Serve with straw.

Disclaimer some panelist didn't have the needed ingredients so they were drinking another themed drink Scotch on the BLOCKS....get it becuase it's blockchain?

Subscribe on YouTube for future episodes. Watch out we will have another episode of The New Normal in a couple weeks!

If you want to learn more about the companies featured on the episode here are the links to their websites:

BurstIQ

Cypress Data Defense

Lark Security

9 Secure Code Review Best Practices For Your Web Application

Thu, 14 May 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Modern web applications are feature-rich to provide a seamless user experience and intuitive flow through business data and logic.

Due to rising customer demands and rapid, feature-driven development, security often takes the backseat and vulnerabilities are introduced and oftentimes go undetected.

A secure code review helps identify these security vulnerabilities and weaknesses that might go undetected otherwise. It applies a set of security standards to the code to ensure secure coding best practices and development have been followed.

Secure code reviews use automated tools, checklists, thread modeling, software development experience, and security experience to identify security vulnerabilities can be mitigated.

9 Secure Code Review Best Practices

Secure code reviews should be ingrained as part of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

Here are some of the most effective secure code review best practices that you should follow:

1. Create a Comprehensive Secure Code Review Checklist

Each software solution has its own security requirements and features so a code review can vary from one software application to another.

Having a comprehensive secure code review checklist helps ensure that you don’t miss key items and perform a thorough code review.

Here are some questions you should consider while conducting a secure code review:

Have you implemented proper authorization controls?
Have you implemented proper authentication controls? Do you have two-factor or multi-factor authentication in place?
Is sensitive data encrypted? How do you handle encryption keys?
Does the error message display sensitive information to the user?
Do you have other security controls in place that prevent SQL Injection, XSS attacks, malware, etc?

These are just a few questions that you might want to include in your secure code review checklist. Keep in mind that a checklist might not be exhaustive in many cases, but it can provide a direction to the code reviewer and help them perform effective secure code reviews and deliver high-quality and secure code.

2. Review Constantly

It is essential for companies to perform secure code reviews regularly to ensure that whenever a significant change is made into the code, it is effectively reviewed.

A secure code review doesn’t need you to wait for the development process to be completed. Rather you can perform a code review as the development progresses.

By reviewing your code regularly, you can identify loopholes or loose ends that could be exploited by attackers and fix them in a timely manner. It also enhances the overall security of the code and results in higher quality code, making future implementations quick, easy, and affordable.

3. Use Threat Modeling

Threat modeling enables organizations to identify threats and develop efficient responses. Having a structured threat modeling process in place helps to detect, understand, and communicate threats and mitigations to protect the application assets.

Threat modeling can take place during planning, design, development and/or later deployment phases. It not only helps identify risks but also helps teams to better understand the relationship between an application’s various components.

As the application’s environment and design changes throughout the project’s life, having the knowledge of how the components are interconnected with the product is valuable. This can help you understand the security threats and risks better.

4. Use Automation Tools to Save Time (But Don’t Let Automation do EVERYTHING)

Automation tools can play a crucial role, especially in securing software as the code you have, the less effective your code review might be at detecting code flaws line by line.

With applications consisting of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lines of code, it’s impossible to perform a comprehensive code review line by line manually in any reasonable amount of time.

Automation tools enable streamlined processes with minimal human intervention allowing them to focus on more complex tasks that require logical or business analysis. Automated static code analysis tools provide nearly full code coverage along with the ability to reveal vulnerabilities that might otherwise go undetected if checked manually.

For instance, if a static code analysis tool discovers an SQL or an XSS injection vulnerability, it could result in searching the codebase for similar vulnerable patterns, a time-consuming and practically impossible task if done by hand.

While you can rely on automation for many things, you can not rely on it for everything. Despite the fact that automation offers numerous benefits, it also poses certain challenges, for example, automation can’t find design and architectural flaws among many other flaws that automation cannot reliably detect.

Since automation tools do not have a proper understanding of business processes, they are unable to find flaws in logic areas. In addition to this, automation also creates a lot of false positives, which can derail the entire testing process since reviewers have to then check these identified vulnerabilities manually.

5. Use the Expertise of an Application Security Professional

While automated tools are more efficient than their human counterparts in performing time-intensive tasks such as searching for vulnerable code patterns within a massive codebase, they fall short in a variety of other aspects.

This is why an application security professional is needed to bind together the secure code review process and provide clarity and context to it. The experience and knowledge of a security analyst or code reviewer is indispensable in the secure code review of a web application. For example, in tasks where the code review needs their ability to identify application logic issues.

However, you can leverage the strengths of security professionals and those of automated tools to advance your secure code review process, allowing security teams to determine a comprehensive array of risks and vulnerabilities.

6. Validate Your Input and Output

A major part of a secure code review is to analyze the attack surface of the software. Attackers often use input and output to exploit vulnerabilities of an application and gain access to information or conduct other malicious activities.

The primary goal is to identify and review various inputs from all untrusted data sources and validate outputs as well. By validating the input, you can ensure that your application handles the untrusted input appropriately so that potentially malicious input is not used to attack the application..

By validating output, you can ensure that your application doesn’t harm the end user or other systems that ingest data from your application.

Inputs may come from the cookies, data feeds, service responses, command lines, flat files, property files, environment variables, external processes, and the browser. Check the valid semantics and syntax of information system inputs (such as character length, set, acceptable values, and numerical range) to ensure that inputs match specified standards for content and format.

Input validation helps ensure accurate inputs and prevent attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and a wide range of other injection attacks. Therefore, it is critical that applications validate input data before they process it.

Additionally, when you are sending output data to a user’s web browser, a network, a file, or some other place, you need to ensure that the data you send is safe.

7. Enforce Least Privilege

Another secure code best practices include the implementation of least privilege model that allows authorized users to specifically access only information that they need to perform their job functions or tasks. For instance, a user account responsible to maintain the customer records does not need access to other employees’ financial records.

Surprisingly, the 2019 Global Data Risk Report revealed that over 22% of folders were open to every employee. These folders may contain sensitive data, and a malicious insider actor may use these folders to conduct data breaches in their organization. Therefore, it is highly crucial to implement the least privilege access model.

In some instances, if a user needs admin rights or higher privileges to access a specific data, it must be provided for only the minimum time required to complete the task. The least privilege model significantly reduces the scope of harm that can be caused by the unauthorized or unwanted use of network privileges.

8. Conduct Secure Application Development Training

As more data breaches occur, cybersecurity professionals try to stay abreast of the latest technology and tools to ensure a secure application or system. But it’s not just the security team that should be responsible for maintaining security in your software.

Conduct regular training sessions on secure application development to educate your developers about secure coding, and how they can use it to improve software development processes while reducing code vulnerabilities.

Secure application development will help identify and mitigate risks early in the development process which will further reduce the possibility of data breaches and cyberattacks.

9. Manage Your Vulnerabilities

A secure code review might reveal an array of security risks and vulnerabilities. It is important to identify, evaluate, mitigate, and report these security vulnerabilities in the system and the software that runs on them.

Managing your vulnerabilities is critical for organizations to prioritize potential threats and minimize their attack surface.

Some scanning tools also include vulnerability remediation which categorizes and ranks the vulnerability according to their risk and severity. This is often done by comparing the vulnerabilities against security policies.

With every change in the application comes the risk of a potential loophole being opened in your software that could be exploited by attackers. This might impact your company’s market reputation and credibility.

Final Thoughts

A secure code review is a time-intensive process that can be performed efficiently using both the strengths of automated tools and the expertise of security professionals.

A secure code review often reveals many insights into the code. Apart from finding new security risks or learning new techniques, you can also check how your development team approaches coding. Better practices can be adopted to conduct a more precise and effective code review.

If you have any questions about these secure code review best practices or need any help with your secure code review, please contact us.

The New Normal Ep1 Feat: Kyle Shannon CEO of StoryVine

Wed, 06 May 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Welcome to the first episode of The New Normal!

In this episode, our panel talks to the always entertaining, serial entrepreneur, Kyle Shannon CEO of StoryVine! The group gives advice on how to maintain a positive business culture while working from lockdown, and other interesting things they have noticed running a business in this New Normal.

Subscribe here to watch them live, and on YouTube for future episodes. Also, be sure to look out for us on itunes and Spotify very soon for the podcast version.

Our next episode will be on a new time at 4:00pm Mountain so that we can have a Happy Hour cocktail at an acceptable hour! We will be posting more details on that episode soon including the topic and the drink of the week.

If you want to learn more about the companies featured on the episode here are the links to their websites:

StoryVine

Cypress Data Defense

Lark Security

Vulnerability Management: 5 Best Practices to Protect Your Business

Mon, 04 May 2020 15:04:10 GMT

An inconvenient truth about running a business these days is the soaring number of cyberattacks that target a wide range of organizations - ranging from startups to small and midsize businesses (SMBs) to giant multinational corporations.

One consistent avenue for attackers to exploit businesses is through discovering vulnerabilities in software and other systems before vendors can issue patches. These vulnerabilities often go undetected for long periods of time and can potentially allow direct access to an attacker.

An average of 81% of all security issues is related to network vulnerabilities, whereas 19% is associated with web applications such as APIs.

Vulnerability management is an effective security solution that helps identify and address networks, applications, processes, and software vulnerabilities. Vulnerability management is somewhat of an umbrella term defined to cover the entire process of identifying and managing vulnerabilities in software.

What is Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability management is the process of identifying vulnerabilities in an environment, evaluating the risks associated with them, and taking appropriate measures to mitigate them.

It is a proactive approach to manage security vulnerabilities by early detection and reducing the likelihood that weaknesses in code or design could compromise the security of your systems or an endpoint.

Vulnerability management involves several steps ranging from vulnerability scanning to taking other aspects such as risk acceptance, mitigation, and remediation.

Identify assets: The first step in vulnerability management is identifying assets in your company. For example, if a database stores the sensitive information of customers, it needs to be well protected.
Scan vulnerabilities: Once you have identified critical assets, scan them for vulnerabilities. You can do this via regular network scanning, penetration testing, or using an automated tool like a vulnerability scanner.
Identify vulnerabilities: Once the network is scanned for vulnerabilities, the pen test results, or vulnerability scan results are analyzed to determine anomalies that suggest risks or potential malicious threats that could take advantage of a security vulnerability or could exploit a vulnerability in the future.
Determine the severity of vulnerabilities: In this step, vulnerabilities are classified on the basis of their severity, the level of risk they represent, and their impact on applications, networks, and servers on the system.
Address vulnerabilities: After determining the severity of vulnerabilities, it is time to accept, transfer, or mitigate these vulnerabilities.

The Importance of Vulnerability Management

Vulnerabilities in a system represent security flaws that could be exploited by cyber criminals to gain access to sensitive data, cause denial of service, and damage to other assets. Attackers are regularly looking for new vulnerabilities they can abuse and take advantage of security gaps such as unpatched vulnerabilities.

A survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute found that of those companies that suffered a breach, nearly 60% were caused due to an unpatched vulnerability. These breaches could have been easily avoided by survey respondents if they had simply had a vulnerability management solution in place that patched vulnerabilities and fixed them before hackers exploited them.

Having a vulnerability management solution in place that constantly checks for new vulnerabilities and helps mitigate them is essential for preventing cybersecurity breaches. Without a proper vulnerability management and patch system in place, old security gaps may be left on the software or network for a prolonged period of time.

By integrating a strong vulnerability management system in your organization, you can secure and control your cybersecurity risks.

5 Vulnerability Management Best Practices

Vulnerability management is a process that should be performed regularly in order to determine, assess, mitigate, and report software vulnerabilities.

To stay abreast of the latest changes made in its software, new systems added to its network, and regularly discovering new vulnerabilities, here are some best practices that you should consider:

1. Establish a Vulnerability Management Strategy

There are several reasons why companies establish a vulnerability management strategy. One of the most primary reasons is to comply with security standards or frameworks, such as ISO 27001 or PCI DSS.

Additionally, having a vulnerability management strategy allows you to develop and enhance visibility in your IT infrastructure. This helps ensure that your business can effectively respond to security risks in a timely manner.

A poorly created strategy for vulnerability management is less likely to achieve significant results. An organization that wants to create a successful vulnerability management strategy will implement a comprehensive set of security controls that will include a combination of the following:

People: The security or IT team of an enterprise should have the necessary skills and experience to properly implement the strategy. What really makes a difference is their ability to understand how security vulnerabilities and risks affect the overall IT environment. Team members should also have the capability and experience to effectively communicate with stakeholders, such as technical staff, users, or business management.
Process: Creating a vulnerability management strategy is one thing, however its efficacy depends on the organization’s ability to build a solid strategy and implement the processes that are achievable and actionable. An effective strategy helps make quick decisions such as mitigation or remediation of discovered vulnerabilities.
Technology: Businesses should consider what tools are ideal for their vulnerability management strategy and how they should be configured. These tools should be capable of more than just obtaining information about vulnerabilities, from the business’ IT environment. Furthermore, they should also involve asset tracking and database, and ticketing systems.

While these might work independently sometimes, their real power can emerge when complementary systems work together to leverage the viewpoint of other systems. Thus, it is important for a vulnerability management strategy to provide well-defined integration points to connect various security controls to gain maximum benefits.

2. Use the Right Vulnerability Management Tools

There are various vulnerability scanning tools available, and they typically consist of a console and scanning engines. Vulnerability scanning is a crucial part of vulnerability management programs because it is a well-structured method to scan, identify, assess, and report potential weaknesses on a network.

What is a vulnerability scanner tool?

As the name implies, a vulnerability scanner tool scans your IT infrastructure (such as software, applications, networks, servers, routers, and computers), then identifies and reports on vulnerabilities, active Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, operating systems, services, and software that are installed and running.

These scanner tools usually compare the information they find against a known set of vulnerabilities in their databases or third-party information databases such as SANS Institute, OVAL, CVE, or the OSVDB.

However, not all vulnerability scanning tools are equal. Many free and low-end scanning tools simply scan a system or network and provide remedial reporting; they also suffer from high false-positives and false-negatives. Whereas, more feature-rich tools include penetration testing and patch management, among other components with more accurate results.

What should you consider while choosing a vulnerability scanning tool?

While choosing a vulnerability scanning tool, it’s important to acquire information about how they are rated for their reliability, scalability, accuracy, and reporting. If a tool lacks accuracy, you might end up running two different tools, hoping one picks up vulnerabilities that the other misses. This could add effort and cost to the scanning process.

Before you choose a scanning tool, you should consider the following criteria:

Usability: It is crucial for organizations to choose a vulnerability scanning tool that suits all of its users, regardless of their knowledge about the technology, to ensure that every member proactively participates in maintaining security in the system. The vulnerability scanning tool should be easy to install and offer great accessibility to its users. In addition to this, the tool should offer automation to perform repetitive tasks that are otherwise done by security professionals.
Cutting edge technology: A vulnerability scanning tool should be capable of providing a total view of a business’s cybersecurity resources. This can only be achieved if a business utilizes state-of-the-art or cutting edge technology which can identify even the most recent security threats and risks. For instance, integrating machine learning in vulnerability scanning is one of the most recent trends today.
False-positive rates: An organization should find out the false-positive rates of a tool before purchasing. A tool with a high false-positive rate may flood data, report issues, and trigger false alarms. This will lead to a loss of resources such as the time and effort invested because a false alarm may cause the security team to perform manual scanning and checks.
Metrics: Reporting is the most critical feature of any vulnerability scanning tool. It helps with the mitigation process of the discovered vulnerabilities. That’s why it’s important to find a tool that can offer flexible and comprehensive reports that provide custom data views, proper information about the identified vulnerabilities, an overview status of the overall security, and analysis of trends. If a vulnerability scanning tool delivers incomplete information, the tool can’t help accomplish security-related goals.
Placement: Another key aspect of using vulnerability management tools is their placement, whether the organization is using commercial tools or doing manual checks. Poor placement of a tool can lead to inaccurate findings or results. A business should ensure that its vulnerability management tools deliver all the necessary functionalities it needs.

3. Extend the Application of Vulnerability Scanning Tools

Vulnerability scanning tools are typically developed and designed to identify vulnerabilities. However, you can extend the application of these tools to gain value in other processes and aspects of your business including:

Application Management: Vulnerability scanning is an essential part of the software development lifecycle, especially when it comes to pre-release testing and post-implementation. Conducting vulnerability scans provides visibility of problems and issues in applications and ensures that these vulnerabilities are addressed immediately. For instance, if a vulnerability scanning tool scans a code, it can be scanned at different points throughout the software development lifecycle: during development, integration testing, user acceptance testing, before the production stage, and after the production stage.
Infrastructure: Vulnerability scanning tools provide detailed understanding to improve and develop validations for patches, configurations, and post-build. For instance, a security team might be in charge of testing the configuration of a new server. A vulnerability scanning tool can provide a comprehensive report about whether the build suits the configuration, checks, and authenticates important settings, and can go further into the server to assess it. From there, a security team can perform a vulnerability check to ensure that the tool determines and addresses all vulnerabilities. This helps analyze the new server and ensure it is safe to use.
Review local users and groups: Vulnerability scanning tools can be used to identify specific local users and groups. This may help identify potential vulnerabilities or security risks.
Identify rogue devices: Vulnerability scanning tools can also identify rogue devices in a system by assessing all the assets within an IP address.
Certificate management: A business may also use vulnerability scanning tools to identify the certificates they utilize. Frequent scans can reveal installed certificates, whether they are self-signed or purchased, along with their expiry dates. Since these tools can help keep track of the expiration dates, businesses have ample time to replace the certificates or extend compliance.

4. Scan Frequently to Close the Door on Network Attacks

Vulnerabilities can be introduced in your network at any time, so it is important to scan the network regularly to ensure that these vulnerabilities are discovered and fixed quickly.

There are two ways to accomplish excellent security in your network.

One, you can assign all the necessary resources to maintain security in your network and find any new security issues. You can ensure all the patches and updates are done at once and are implemented correctly.

Second, utilize a security scanning tool to test your existing network security, applications, equipment, and website to identify vulnerabilities that exist on them and fix them. While an intrusion detection system/intrusion prevention system (IDS/IPS), antivirus, and firewalls are all crucial security measures, it is also important to fix all issues rather than trying to hide them.

In a nutshell, it means that you should proactively fix the existing security weaknesses instead of just building higher security walls. This will help you create a better security model and understand your vulnerabilities more completely.

5. Identify & Remediate Vulnerabilities in a Timely Manner

It is essential for organizations to perform a regular and timely identification and remediation of security vulnerabilities. However, there’s an issue with the remediation of vulnerabilities - it can sometimes be overwhelming. It might involve thousand-page long scan reports and this can be time consuming.

How can you effectively remediate vulnerabilities?

To simplify this issue, here are three steps you should take:

Categorize: The most basic step of remediation of vulnerabilities is classifying them according to their risks, impact, and severity. Categorizing these vulnerabilities helps businesses to understand and assess the issues. For instance, these categories could be false positives, low-risk assets, configuration issues, missing patches, or outdated software. So if a business determines that a high amount of vulnerabilities fall into the category of configuration issues, they can take appropriate actions to configure them quickly.
Prioritize: Not all discovered vulnerabilities are equal. When a vulnerability scan is done, it acquires information on a large scale and ends up with a comprehensive report on all vulnerability issues. But it’s not necessary that all these risks are urgent and need immediate attention, that’s why businesses should prioritize vulnerabilities and respond accordingly.
Bite-size: Once you have categorized and prioritized vulnerabilities, break down your remediation process into bite-size chunks to make them more manageable and effective. Companies should check which tasks are achievable and actionable, making note of quick wins and slow processes that might take more time.

Final Thoughts

If you are already using a vulnerability management solution, consider extending to your entire network, including servers, printers, phones, computers, test servers, etc. Adopting these vulnerability management best practices is one of the most effective ways to secure your business and protect it from cybersecurity attacks.

If you don’t have a vulnerability management system installed on your system, now is the time. You can also reach out to us for more information and help to secure your business from cyber threats.

The Impact of Security Misconfiguration and Its Mitigation

Wed, 29 Apr 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Today’s cybersecurity threat landscape is highly challenging. Attackers are constantly on the lookout to exploit security vulnerabilities in applications and systems to gain access to or control of sensitive information and launch cyberattacks such as ransomware.

With companies spreading sensitive data across different platforms, software as a service (SaaS) platforms, containers, service providers, and even various cloud platforms, it’s essential that they begin to take a more proactive approach to security.

This means integrating security as a core part of the development process, shifting security to the left, and automating your infrastructure as much as possible to leave behind inefficient, time-consuming, and expensive tactics. One of the most basic aspects of building strong security is maintaining security configuration.

In a study, it was revealed that nearly 73% of organizations have at least one critical security misconfiguration that could expose critical data and systems or enable attackers to gain access to sensitive information or private services or to the main AWS (Amazon Web Services) console.

These “critical” security misconfigurations could be leaving remote SSH open to the entire internet which could allow an attacker to gain access to the remote server from anywhere, rendering network controls such as firewalls and VPN moot. Furthermore, the SSH traffic from the internet using the root account also has severe security repercussions.

Security misconfiguration vulnerabilities often occur due to insecure default configuration, side-effects of configuration changes, or just insecure configuration. This indicates the need for basic configuration auditing and security hygiene as well as automated processes. Instead of using traditional network controls, servers should be grouped by role, using automation to create small and secure network paths to build trust between peers.

Before we delve into the impact of security misconfiguration, let’s have a look at what security misconfiguration really means.

What is Security Misconfiguration?

Security misconfiguration is the implementation of improper security controls, such as for servers or application configurations, network devices, etc. that may lead to security vulnerabilities.

For example, insecure configuration of web applications could lead to numerous security flaws including:

Incorrect folder permissions
Default passwords or username
Setup/Configuration pages enabled
Debugging enabled

A security misconfiguration could range from forgetting to disable default platform functionality that could grant access to unauthorized users such as an attacker to failing to establish a security header on a web server. Security misconfiguration can happen at any level of an application, including the web server, database, application server, platform, custom code, and framework.

The impact of a security misconfiguration in your web application can be far reaching and devastating. According to Microsoft, cybersecurity breaches can now globally cost up to $500 billion per year, with an average breach costing a business $3.8 million.

Making matters worse, one of the biggest myths about cybersecurity attacks is that they don’t impact small businesses because they’re too small to be targeted or noticed.

Busting this myth, Small Business Trends forecasted that at least 43% of cyberattacks are targeted specifically at small businesses. Fundamentally, security misconfigurations such as cloud misconfiguration are one of the biggest security threats to organizations.

In fact, it was a cloud misconfiguration that caused the leakage of nearly 400 million Time Warner Cable customers’ personal information. An outsider service provider had accidentally misconfigured the cloud storage and made it publicly available, exposing the company’s SQL database to everyone.

Security Misconfiguration Examples

To give you a better understanding of potential security misconfigurations in your web application, here are some of the best examples:

Example #1: Default Configuration Has Not Been Modified/Updated

If you have not changed the configuration of your web application, an attacker might discover the standard admin page on your server and log in using the default credentials and perform malicious actions.

Example #2: Directory Listing is Not Disabled on Your Server

In such cases, if an attacker discovers your directory listing, they can find any file. Hackers can find and download all your compiled Java classes, which they can reverse engineer to get your custom code. They can then exploit this security control flaw in your application and carry out malicious attacks.

Example #3: Insecure Server Configuration Can Lead Back to the Users, Exposing Their Personal Information

Applications with security misconfigurations often display sensitive information in error messages that could lead back to the users. This could allow attackers to compromise the sensitive data of your users and gain access to their accounts or personal information.

Example #4: Sample Applications Are Not Removed From the Production Server of the Application

Many times these sample applications have security vulnerabilities that an attacker might exploit to access your server.

Example #5: Default Configuration of Operating System (OS)

The default configuration of most operating systems is focused on functionality, communications, and usability. If you have not updated or modified the default configuration of your OS, it might lead to insecure servers.

To protect your servers, you should build sophisticated and solid server hardening policies for all the servers in your organization. Use CIS benchmarks to help harden your servers.

How to Detect Security Misconfiguration: Identification and Mitigation

Security misconfiguration is a widespread problem that persists in many systems, networks, and applications, and it’s possible that you might have it as well. These misconfigurations can happen at any level of an IT infrastructure and enable attackers to leverage security vulnerabilities in the application to launch cyberattacks.

What are some of the most common security misconfigurations?

Some of the most common security misconfigurations include incomplete configurations that were intended to be temporary, insecure default configurations that have never been modified, and poor assumptions about the connectivity requirements and network behavior for the application.

With the rising complexity of operating systems, networks, applications, workloads, and frameworks, along with cloud environments and hybrid data centers, security misconfiguration is rapidly becoming a significant security challenge for enterprises. These environments are diverse and rapidly changing, making it difficult to understand and implement proper security controls for security configuration.

For instance, the lack of visibility when managing firewalls across cloud and hybrid environments and on-premise continue to increase security challenges and make compliance with privacy regulations and security difficult for enterprises.

Lack of visibility in your cloud platform, software, applications, networks, and servers is a leading contributor to security misconfigurations and increased risk.

A report found that almost one-third of networks had 100 or more firewalls for their environment and each firewall had a different set of rules to manage. Further, 34% of networks had 50% or less real-time visibility into their network security risks and compliance, which causes a lack of visibility across the entire infrastructure and leads to security misconfigurations.

Here are some more examples of security misconfigurations:

Insecure admin console open for an application. These ports expose the application and can enable an attacker to take advantage of this security flaw and modify the admin controls.
Idle virtual machines in the cloud: Often companies are not aware about idle virtual machines sitting in their cloud and continue to pay for those VMs for days and months on end due to poor lack of visibility in their cloud. These idle VMs may not be actively managed and may be missed when applying security patches.
Outbound connections to a variety of internet services. These could reveal unintended behavior of the software in a sensitive environment.
Legacy applications that are trying to establish communication with the applications that do not exist anymore. Hackers could replicate these applications and build communication with legacy apps.

In addition to this, web servers often come with a set of default features including QA features, debugging, sample applications, and many others, which are enabled by default. These features may provide a means to an attacker to circumvent security protocols and gain access to the sensitive information of your customers or your organization, through elevated privileges.

Attackers may also try to detect misconfigured functions with low concurrency limits or long timeouts in order to launch Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. Functions with low concurrency limit configuration could result in DoS attacks as the attacker just needs to invoke the misconfigured function several times until it is unavailable.

Functions which contain insecure sensitive information such as tokens and keys in the code or environment variables can also be compromised by the attackers and may result in data leakage.

How can you diagnose and determine security misconfigurations?

There are several ways you can quickly detect security misconfigurations in your systems:

Scan hybrid environments and cloud infrastructure to identify resources. Use built-in services such as AWS Trusted Advisor which offers security checks.
Verify that you have proper access control in place
Set up alerts for suspicious user activity or anomalies from “normal” behavior. Unusual behavior may demonstrate where you have inadequate security controls in the configuration settings.
Check for default configuration in the admin console or other parts of the server, network, devices, and application.

What is the Impact of Security Misconfiguration?

According to a report by IBM, the number of security misconfigurations has skyrocketed over the past few years. The report found that breaches related to security misconfiguration jumped by 424%, accounting for nearly 70% of compromised records during the year.

While companies are integrating better security practices and investing in cybersecurity, attackers are conducting more sophisticated attacks that are difficult to trace and mitigate quickly.

Human error is also becoming a more prominent security issue in various enterprises. These human errors lead to an array of security flaws including security misconfigurations, phishing attacks, malware, ransomware, insider threats, and many others.

Security misconfigurations can stem from simple oversights, but can easily expose your business to attackers. In some cases, misconfigured networks and systems can leave data wide open without any need for a security breach or attack by malicious actors.

A common security misconfiguration is leaving insecure sensitive data in the database without proper authentication controls and access to the open internet.

One of the most notable breaches caused due to security misconfiguration was when 154 million US voter records were exposed in a breach of security by a Serbian hacker.

The database contained records of 154 million voters which included their names, ages, genders, phone numbers, addresses, marital statuses, congressional political parties, state senate district affiliations, and estimated incomes. The database was a CouchDB that required no authentication and could be accessed by anyone which led to a massive security breach.

In this example of security misconfiguration, the absence of basic security controls on storage devices or databases led to the exploitation of massive amounts of sensitive and personal data to everyone on the internet.

The more code and sensitive data is exposed to users, the greater the security risk. Failure to properly configure the lockdown access to an application’s database can give attackers the opportunity to steal data or even modify parts of it to conduct malicious activities.

How Can You Prevent Security Misconfiguration?

The first and foremost step to preventing security misconfiguration is learning the behavior of your systems, and understanding each critical component and its behavior.

To do this, you need to have a precise, real-time map of your entire infrastructure, which shows flows and communication across your data center environment, whether it's on hybrid cloud, or on-premises.

Once you have a thorough understanding of your systems, the best way to mitigate risks due to security misconfiguration is by locking down the most critical infrastructure, allowing only specific authorized users to gain access to the ecosystem.

Here are some effective ways to prevent security misconfiguration:

Deploy a repeatable hardening process that makes it easy and fast to deploy another environment that is properly configured. The development, production, and QA environments should all be configured identically, but with different passwords used in each environment. Automate this process to reduce the effort required to set up a new secure environment.
Regularly install software updates and patches in a timely manner to each environment. Or better yet, patch a golden image and then deploy that image into your environment.
Build a strong application architecture that provides secure and effective separation of components.
Run audits and scans frequently and periodically to help identify potential security misconfigurations or missing patches.
Maintain a well-structured and maintained development cycle. This will help ensure the security testing of the application during the development phase.
Educate and train your employees on the importance of security configurations and how they can impact the overall security of the organization.
Encrypt data-at-rest to help protect information from being compromised.
Apply proper access controls to both directories and files. This helps offset the vulnerability of unprotected directories and files.
If implementing custom code, use a static code security scanner before integrating the code into the production environment. Dynamic testing and manual reviews by security professionals should also be performed.
Use a minimal platform without any unnecessary features, samples, documentation, and components. Remove or do not install insecure frameworks and unused features.
Review cloud storage permissions such as S3 bucket permissions. Review and update all security configurations to all security patches, updates, and notes as a part of the patch management process.
Implement an automated process to ensure that all security configurations are in place in all environments.

Final Thoughts

Dynamic and complex data centers are only increasing the likelihood of security breaches and the risk of human error, as we add more external vendors, third-party suppliers, and hybrid cloud environments.

The impact of a security misconfiguration has far-reaching consequences that can impact the overall security of your organization. Despite the fact that you may have implemented security controls, you need to regularly track and analyze your entire infrastructure for potential security vulnerabilities that may have arisen due to misconfigurations.

Remember that having visibility in a hybrid cloud environment can give you an edge and help you fight security misconfiguration.

Cypress Data Defense provides a detailed map of your cloud infrastructure as the first step, helping you to automatically detect unusual behavior and mitigate misconfigurations in your security. Once you have identified your critical assets and vulnerabilities, you can use mitigation techniques to limit the attack surface and ensure the protection of your data.

5 DevOps Monitoring Strategies for Your Application

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Today, companies are increasingly adopting DevOps for its continuous integration and continuous delivery approach. In the realm of DevOps, the spotlight is often taken by automation.

That is not surprising. Why?

According to the 2019 State of DevOps report by Puppet, DevOps automation has a positive impact on the overall effectiveness of an organization

However, perhaps more than automation, DevOps monitoring is yet another crucial element that helps increase awareness during each stage of the delivery pipeline.

There are numerous aspects of monitoring that you might want to consider. Like what?

What you should monitor, which tools to use, or how to get started with your DevOps monitoring strategy.

While monitoring preceded DevOps, DevOps has further transformed the software development process to such an extent that monitoring has to evolve as well. The overall pace of software development has increased with DevOps and teams are now automating integration and testing, and deploying software in the cloud with quick timelines and continuous delivery.

With DevOps, there’s more to monitor now, from integration, provisioning, to deployment, teams need to use DevOps monitoring strategies to effectively monitor different aspects of the project.

What are the Best 5 DevOps Monitoring Strategies for Your Applications?

To help you with your DevOps monitoring strategies in a rapidly changing environment, we have created a generic framework to help you understand how to get started, what to monitor, which tools to use for monitoring needs, and where you can consolidate.

Determine What You Should Monitor

The first step of effective DevOps monitoring strategies?

Determining what you should monitor in your applications. Monitoring targets can be divided into several primary categories, and you will likely want to cover at least one aspect of each category.

These categories include:

Server health
Application log output
Vulnerabilities
Development milestones
User activity

#Development Milestones

Monitoring development milestones is an indicator of how well your DevOps strategy is working. It is an effective way to gain insights into your workflow and determine how effectively your team is operating. Track the duration of each sprint; the rate at which bugs are identified, documented, and fixed; and the ratio of expected-to-delivered features.

Ask questions such as:

Are we meeting our deadlines? If not, what’s hindering the process?
Is the team following the DevOps approach effectively?

Consolidate monitoring tools whenever possible to streamline and speed up troubleshooting. Use open-source and open-license agents to extend technology and remain vendor-independent.

What else?

You can use machine learning technology to automate configuration tasks and save time.

#Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities can be broadly categorized into two parts: known weaknesses or vulnerabilities in an application that are widely known or identifiable via lists maintained by National Vulnerability Database (NVD), and vulnerabilities that occur due to insecure coding practices, insecure design, or insecure architecture in the application.

It is imperative for businesses to monitor these vulnerabilities and mitigate them in a timely manner. These vulnerabilities can be addressed in several ways such as modifying third-party dependencies, conducting regular secure code reviews, educating your software development team, and hiring experienced professionals.

#User Activity Monitoring

User activity monitoring may be one of the most obvious types of monitoring strategies for DevOps. Unusual requests or unexpected inputs such as multiple failed login attempts, unusual login times, and unknown login device should be constantly monitored to ensure that only authorized users can access the system.

What’s more?

Monitoring the behavior of users can also help detect unusual activities such as access privilege escalation. For instance, a developer attempting to access an admin account.

Such unusual behavior and requests may trigger suspicion and make you more aware of potential insider threats or other cyberattacks that may occur due to poor user activity monitoring.

#Application Log Output

Monitoring application log output is often underestimated, but if your services are distributed and you don’t have centralized logging in place, then this task is much more difficult.

Further, if errors and vulnerabilities are not detected in real-time, they don’t hold that much value. It is important to ensure that faulty codes or error-prone codes generate notifications in real-time, and those notifications are easily searchable. The ability to trace a bug or error in a production environment is a huge bonus.

#Server Health

Monitor your server’s health by analyzing the performance and uptime with respect to the available resources. Make sure that it is properly configured and scanning features are working as intended such as for identifying vulnerabilities in the application. Also, ensure servers are hardened to approved configurations.

Identify Monitoring Functionalities

Monitoring tools for DevOps should be able to collect the performance time-series data from open source agents, track the application of machine learning for alerting and reporting, and collect data in scalable time-series databases.

Here’s a set of functionalities that one or more of your monitoring tools might provide:

Dashboards: Preset easy to customize dashboards and share it with peers.
Diagnostics: Troubleshoot across your full application stack to identify potential vulnerabilities and ensure all features are working as intended.
Data Collector: Open-source and open-license agents for every programming language and middleware.
Data Retention: For time-series performance data and log data.
Notifications: Alerts in real-time that can be integrated with escalation services and instant messaging.
Reports: In-depth insights and reports to help identify performance hotspots and planning.
REST API: Include custom data, update configuration via documented API, and access any data.
Machine Learning: Analysis of capacity lost in non-real time and anomaly detection in real-time.

Monitor Your Full Application Stack

A DevOps monitoring tool you choose should be capable of monitoring your full stack end-to-end and providing faster troubleshooting and quick remediation. This list is not essentially comprehensive but rather intended to cover the largest feature sets in an application:

#Infrastructure Monitoring

Infrastructure monitoring is a key component of full-stack application monitoring strategies.

What should tools measure?

Availability
CPU usage
Disk usage
Uptime
Response time
Databases
Storage
Components
Virtual systems
Performance
User permissions
Security
Network switches
Process level usage
Throughput on the application
Load of the servers

Further, they should also be able to provide a history of trends, time-series data of the measurements, and aggregation of data with process-level drill down.

#Network Monitoring

Network monitoring tools should have the capability to measure performance metrics like latency, different port level metrics, bandwidth, the CPU usage of hosts, network packets flow, and offer custom metrics as well. Generally, network monitoring tools need a platform that works across various network topologies such as cloud-based networks and heterogeneous networks.

#Application Performance Monitoring

Application performance monitoring is where logs are searched, collected, and centralized with tracing and profiling available on the application.

It also helps provide measurements on performance such as availability, error rate, throughput, user response time, slow pages, page loads, third-party JavaScript slowness, track SLAs, browser speed, and checks for end-user transactions.

While this list is not exhaustive by any means, it should give you an idea of what your existing monitoring tools offer and what are the loopholes in your DevOps monitoring strategy.

Evaluate Monitoring Tools for DevOps Workflows

Create an outline framework that can be used as a starting point for the evaluation process by DevOps teams.

By outlining goals that apply to your overall DevOps monitoring strategy, you can narrow down your focus during evaluation to specific questions such as:

“Does this monitoring tool meet my goals and needs?”

Understanding DevOps monitoring tools and the functionalities they offer will allow you to dive deep into feature functionality during the evaluation process.

What’s more?

Knowing the monitoring functionality related to each monitoring aspect such as application monitoring or infrastructure will help inform the best choice for a more specific and comprehensive DevOps monitoring strategy.

Leverage Tools for Effective DevOps Monitoring

Here are some of the best DevOps monitoring tools on the market today:

Collectl - Collectl brings various performance monitoring tools into a single platform. It can monitor a wide range of subsystems such as nodes, storage, processors, TCP, and file systems. Collectl runs on all LInux distributions and is available in Debian and Red Hat repositories.
Consul - Consul provides key-value storage, discovery, failure detection, and other functions across numerous data-center environments. It is integrated with a built-in DNS server for querying services and supports existing infrastructure without modifying code.
God - God uses a Ruby framework to offer a simplified approach to monitoring. It is available on BSD, Darwin systems, and Linux. God provides a simplified way to write event conditions and poll events. It also provides an integrated, custom notification system.
Ganglia - Ganglia leverages a hierarchical design optimized for the federation of clusters. It uses common technologies such as XDR and XML for data representation as well as transport, along with a unique data structure and algorithmic approach to implement a high level of concurrency and reduce overhead on the node.
Nagios - Nagios provides application, network, and server monitoring using a combination of agentless and agent-based software tools for Unix, Linux, Windows and web environments. The system offers uptime, response, and availability using a variety of reporting formats and visualization.

Takeaways

It is crucial for businesses to create and implement effective DevOps monitoring strategies. Quicker development processes in DevOps pose several challenges, specifically regarding vulnerabilities and loopholes in the system that might be left due to rapid processes or lack of testing.

Having efficient and scalable DevOps monitoring strategies will help you gain insights into your application, identify loopholes early in the process, and mitigate them. Remember that while one area of monitoring may be more important for your business than another, it is essential to evaluate various aspects of your application or project.

If you have any questions about or need any help with your DevOps monitoring strategies, get in touch with us.

21 Best Practices for AWS Cloud Security

Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Amazon web services or AWS cloud security is a crucial subject in today’s cybersecurity environment. More businesses are adopting cloud services and shifting to AWS. Given the current landscape, there’s no doubt that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is offering the best security features to AWS users to completely secure their infrastructures.

But security is the shared responsibility of AWS as well as the users. You may have implemented the basic AWS security practices. However, since a large volume of resources is launched and modified in your AWS cloud infrastructure regularly, it is possible that you might have missed some AWS cloud security best practices.

What is AWS?

Amazon web services (AWS) is a widely adopted comprehensive and secured cloud platform that offers fully-featured services such as compute power, content delivery, database storage, and other functionalities to help businesses globally. AWS offers many solutions and tools for software developers and enterprises to help them scale their work and grow.

AWS is divided into different services and each service can be configured as per the user’s needs. It allows users to host dynamic websites by running web and application servers in the cloud; use managed databases such as Oracle, MySQL, or SQL Server to store information; and securely store files on the cloud so they can access them from anywhere.

With the ample benefits that AWS offers, comes the responsibility for maintaining security to ensure your data is safe in the cloud.

Let’s explore more about AWS cloud security best practices and how you can implement them to ensure enhanced security.

Best Practices for AWS Cloud Security

1. Put your strategy first and determine if it supports various tools and controls.

There’s a lot of debate around whether you should put tools and controls in place first, or set up the security strategy. While it might seem like an underlying discussion, the answer is more complex. Usually, it is recommended to establish the security strategy first, so that when you access a tool or control, you can evaluate whether or not and how well it supports your strategy.

Moreover, it allows you to bake security into all organizational functions including those relying on AWS. Putting a security strategy in place first is also of great help with continuous deployment.

For instance, if your company uses configuration management tools such as Ansible, Chef, etc to automate software patches and updates, then having a strong security strategy in place will help you implement security monitoring throughout all the tools from day one.

2. Enforce clear, consistent cloud security controls and procedures.

Most of the recent S3 attacks are related to S3 bucket breaches that contained sensitive information and that were set to “public.” However, S3 buckets are by default set to “private,” meaning only specific users with privileges can access these buckets.

To ensure the safety of data in S3 buckets, or in the cloud, create a set of clearly written and consistent security controls and procedures. These should define the type of data that can be stored in the cloud, build a hierarchy to categorize sensitive data, and determine who should have access to them.

3. Apply security to all layers.

Ensure that you apply security to all layers. Having just one firewall in the infrastructure isn’t enough. Rather, have virtual firewalls on all your virtual networks to control and monitor network traffic to secure your infrastructure and the operating system it is running on. You can easily install these firewalls from the AWS Marketplace.

4. Leverage native cloud security resources.

By deploying tools like Amazon CloudFront in your application, you can protect your web applications hosted anywhere in the world. There is an array of native AWS security tools such as AWS Shield, Guard Duty, and Cloud Watch readily available that can help you secure your cloud environment.

Additionally, standard compliance frameworks such as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), and ISO/IEC 27000 series that are preconfigured with various compliance elements built-in can offer significant front-end work already done for you.

5. Develop a security culture.

Maintaining security should be a top-to-bottom effort with every member of the organization taking responsibility for it. Especially in today’s time when there's a lack of cybersecurity professionals and it’s hard to find individuals who are skilled in the latest technologies and tools.

Whether you have a dedicated security team or no infosec employees at all, ensure that you train all your employees about the importance of security and how they can contribute to strengthening the overall security of the organization.

6. Monitor user access for your database.

It is important that you monitor user access for your database and determine their purpose. For instance, map out all administrative tasks to ensure that granular or least privilege access controls are implemented after moving into the cloud.

Further, if your application uses external data sources, consider using controls such as data integrity validation and data-in-motion encryption to maintain data integrity and confidentiality.

7. Configure a password policy.

Password cracking, brute force attacks, and credential stuffing are some of the most common security attacks that cybercriminals use to target organizations and their users. Having a strong password policy in place is critical to the security of your organization as it can significantly reduce the chances of a security breach.

Consider creating a password policy that describes a set of conditions for password creation, modification, and deletion. For instance, implement multi-factor authentication, automated lockout after multiple failed login attempts, or a password renewal policy after a certain period of time (for example 60 days).

8. Use password generator tools to create complex, secure passwords.

Once you have a strong password policy in place, use password generators to create complex secure passwords that are less likely to be cracked by an attacker.

AWS allows you to enforce the policy of complex passwords in the IAM password policy section. Having a mix of upper and lower cases, numeric, and special characters will help you create a relatively more secure password as compared to your birthdate or your name.

9. Encrypt sensitive information.

Encrypting your sensitive information can go a long way in securing your data. It is quite easy and simple to enable encryption in AWS, especially if you have chosen their native encryption, which provides HTTPS and end-to-end SSL/TLS for APIs and AWS Service.

How can you encrypt sensitive data?

You can also use scalable key management to create, define, rotate, and audit your encryption keys in one place. For client-side encryption, use AWS encryption with EBS, RDS, and S3 or Azure Secure Server Encryption (SSW) with files and blobs. Ensure that data stored on S3 via SSL has encrypted endpoints to protect data in transit as well.

10. Don’t use expired certificates.

Keep your SSL/TLS certificates updated as the older version may not be compatible with AWS services, which may lead to errors for custom applications or ELB, impacting the overall security and productivity of your company.

11. Backup your data regularly.

Every organization must create regular backups of their data. In AWS, your backup strategy depends on your existing IT setup, the nature of your data, and industry requirements.

How can you backup your data in AWS?

AWS offers flexible backup and restore solutions to protect your data against cyber thefts and security breaches. You can use AWS Backup, which provides a centralized console to manage and automate backups across AWS services.

It integrates Amazon RDS, Amazon EFS, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Storage Gateway, and Amazon EBS to enable regular backups of key data stores, such as databases, filesystems, and storage volumes.

12. Use EBS encryption.

Amazon EBS encryption provides a simple encryption solution that doesn't require you to build, maintain, and secure your own key management infrastructure for your EBS resources.

The encryption takes place on the servers hosting EC2 instances and ensures the security of both data-in-transit and data-in-rest and its attached EBS storage. With Amazon EBS encryption, you can encrypt both the data volumes and boot of an EC2 instance.

13. Lockdown your root account credentials.

Root account credentials enable users with full access to the resources in the system, however, this makes the system vulnerable to security breaches.

Instead of having root account access keys, implement an Identity and Access Management (IAM) admin user which defines and manages the access privileges and roles of individual network users. Additionally, use multi-factor authentication (MFA) to enhance security as it adds an extra layer of protection.

14. Keep your AWS policies and practices up to date.

An important way to secure your AWS cloud infrastructure is to create consistent security policies that every individual can follow. By implementing clear and concise security practices, you can protect your AWS cloud environment from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, unauthorized use/access, malware, hackers, and other risks.

Ensure that you document all of your AWS policies and processes and store them in a common place like a shared drive on the internal network where every individual can access them. Keep updating this document regularly with the latest cloud security approach to ensure that all your employees, third-party vendors, trading partners, and stakeholders remain on the same page.

15. Use vulnerability reporting.

With the rising number of cybersecurity attacks, it is critical for businesses now to assess their infrastructure and determine vulnerabilities that could put their data to risk. In AWS, users are advised to avoid entering passwords, clicking on links, or downloading attachments through email that look suspicious.

What if users detect suspicious activity or emails?

Users can directly report suspicious emails to Amazon's system. Not only does this alert AWS regarding potential cloud security breaches against your organization, but it also builds a culture of security and generates awareness among users.

You can also report potential hacking and phishing scams to the authorities like the FBI local office, the Internet Crime Complaint Center or the U.S. Secret Service.

16. Ensure all of your servers are patched.

Make sure that you patch all your AWS cloud servers, even if they are not publicly accessible. There are many tools available that can help you automate and manage the process of patching your AWS cloud servers.

For instance, AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager enables you to automate and manage instances related to both AWS security and other types of updates. With Patch Manager, you can apply patches to an array of Amazon EC2 instances, virtual machines (VMs), and your on-premises servers as well.

17. Use key policies to control access to CMKs.

Each CMK in the AWS KMS has a key policy associated with it that determines the use and management of the key permissions. The default key policy allows the user to define principals, and enable the root user in the account to define IAM policies.

To ensure the best AWS security practices, modify the default key policy according to your company's requirements. Also, implement least privilege access which limits the access of users to only those resources that they absolutely require access to in order to perform legitimate business functions.

18. Implement strong network security protocols and policies.

Often, people have a presiding notion that because AWS offers enterprise-class infrastructure, security is taken care of. While the AWS network provides significant security controls and enables organizations to configure settings such as firewall ports and access controls, that alone isn’t sufficient to protect your network completely.

Advanced malware can target your AWS through SQL injection attacks, network traffic, botnets, and cross-site scripting. Further, if one virtual server of AWS is compromised, it might impact other vulnerable servers operating in the same environment.

How can you protect your AWS from cyber attacks?

To ensure better security, integrate a “Shared responsibility model” which defines your responsibility apart from Amazon's security. For instance, implement data integrity authentication, both server-side and client-side encryption, network traffic validation, authentication, and encryption.

Bring your security team in early during the process to ensure security is taken care of from day one. Don’t presume that AWS cloud security will interfere with the agility of your organization.

19. Choose regions to manage network latency and regulatory compliance.

AWS provides information about the state and country where each region resides. Make sure that you manage network latency and regulatory compliance according to the regions.

20. Monitor user access for the AWS management console.

The AWS Management Console is like the advanced dashboard on a site, from where you can completely control and manage all your AWS resources and instances. Some of the key features that AWS Management console offers is creating new virtual machines, removing any current virtual machines, or modifying other AWS services.

Having access to this console is similar to having the keys to a kingdom. Make sure that you monitor user access to the AWS management console and detect unauthorized access.

21. Use AMIs for platform components.

Instead of configuring a Linux Server or a WordPress machine from scratch, use Amazon machine images (AMIs) to launch an instance. A single AMI can help you launch multiple instances with the same configuration.

You can also use different AMIs to launch instances with different configurations. Using an AMI will help you save the time and effort required to set up AWS security configuration work and also reduce risks.

Final Thoughts

As you shift to an AWS cloud infrastructure or grow your existing AWS, you will need to take a deeper look into the security of your AWS infrastructure. Users also need to be updated about the latest changes to adopt better, more comprehensive security measures. These were just a few AWS security best practices that you can implement to maintain strong security for your AWS ecosystem.

How to Perform a Cyber Security Risk Assessment: A Step-by-Step Guide

Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Companies are increasingly spending money on cyber security. However, attackers are launching more sophisticated cyber attacks that are hard to detect, and businesses often suffer severe consequences from them.

In the first half of 2019 alone, data breaches exposed nearly 4.1 billion records. This is why it is imperative for businesses to empower themselves with the knowledge of how strong their cyber security is, what potential vulnerabilities exist, and how those risks can be mitigated.

Performing a cyber security risk assessment helps organizations strengthen their overall security. The primary goal of a risk assessment is to determine what the critical assets are and if a threat exploits those assets, how much it would cost to mitigate those risks and to protect your assets from a breach.

How can you perform a cyber risk assessment?

In order to perform a cyber security risk assessment, you need consider three factors:

Importance of the assets at risk
Severity of the threat
Vulnerability of the system

But before we dive into how to perform a cyber security risk assessment, let’s understand what a cyber security risk assessment is.

What is a Cyber Security Risk Assessment?

A cyber security risk assessment is the fundamental approach for companies to assess, identify, and modify their security protocols and enable strong security operations to safeguard it against attackers.

It also helps to understand the value of the various types of data generated and stored across the organization. Without determining the value of your data, it is quite difficult to prioritize and assign resources where they are needed the most.

In a cyber security risk assessment, you also have to consider how your company generates revenue, how your employees and assets affect the profitability of the organization, and what potential risks could lead to monetary losses for the company.

Once you have identified all this, you should think about how you could enhance your IT infrastructure to reduce potential risks that might lead to financial losses to the organization.

Furthermore, a cyber security risk assessment helps inform decision makers and support proper risk responses. Most C-suite executives and higher management professionals don’t have the time to delve into the minute details of the company’s cyber security operations.

A cyber security risk analysis serves as a summary to help them make informed decisions about security for their organization.

There are several ways you can collect the information you need to start your risk assessment process:

Review documentation.
Interview data owners, management, and other employees.
Analyze your infrastructure and systems.

How to Perform Cyber Security Risk Assessment?

To begin cyber security risk assessment, you should take the following steps:

Step 1: Determine Information Value

Most organizations don’t have a large budget for security risk assessments, especially small-to-medium businesses (SMBs), so it’s best to limit your scope of assessment to the most critical business information.

Spend time to define a standard for determining the importance of information and prioritizing it. Companies often include asset value, business importance, and legal standing.

Once you have created a standard and it is embedded in your organization’s cyber security risk analysis solution, use it to categorize information as minor, major, or critical.

Here are some questions that you can ask to determine information value:

How valuable is this information to competitors or attackers?
If this information is lost, could you recreate the information? How long would it take? What would be the associated costs?
Are there any financial or legal penalties associated with losing or exposing the information?
Would losing the information impact the company’s day-to-day operations?
What would be the financial damage of the data being leaked or stolen?
What would be the long-term impacts of the information being lost completely or exposed? Would it cause reputational damage? How could you recover from it?

Step 2: Identify and Prioritize Assets

The first and most important step to perform a cyber security risk assessment is to evaluate and determine the scope of the assessment.

This means you have to identify and prioritize which data assets to assess. You may not want to conduct an assessment of all your employees, buildings, trade secrets, electronic data, or office devices.

You need to work with the management and business users to create a comprehensive list of all the valuable assets. Some assets could be valuable because they largely impact your company’s revenue, while others could be valuable because they ensure data integrity to your users.

Once you have identified crucial assets for the assessment, collect the following information:

Data
Purpose
Criticality
Software
Functional requirements
Information flow
Interface
End-users
Hardware
Information security policies
Information security architecture
Network topology
Technical security controls
Physical security controls
Environmental security
Information storage protection
Support personal

Step 3: Identify Threats

Once you have identified and prioritized assets that are crucial to your company, it is time to identify threats that could impact your organization.

A threat can be defined as an occurrence, individual, entity, or action that has the potential to harm operations, systems and/or exploit vulnerabilities to circumvent the security of your organization.

There is a wide range of threats that could impact an enterprise ranging from malware, IT security risks, insider threats, attackers, etc.

Some of the most common threats that affect every organization in one way or another include:

Data leaks: Leakage of sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) like customers’ personal information, credit card info, passwords, other important details could lead to loss of brand reputation and negatively impact your customer relationships. These data leaks could occur due to poor configuration of cloud services, insufficient security policies in place, or weak authentication.
Insider threats: Often, authorized users misuse their access to information and cause data breaches. These threats pose a great risk to companies as they could have devastating impacts including decreased brand reputation and loss of revenue. According to the 2018 Cost of Insider Threats study by the Ponemon Institute, the average cost related to insider threats incidents is $8.76 million.
Service disruption: A cyber attack might cause unexpected service disruptions which could lead to loss of reputation and revenue, which can cause your customers to switch to one of your competitors.

Step 4: Identify Vulnerabilities

A vulnerability is a weakness that could be exploited to cause data breaches or other cyber attacks.

How can you identify vulnerabilities?

There are several ways to identify vulnerabilities:

Audit reports
Vulnerability analysis
Vendor data
Software security analyses
Incident response teams
The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) vulnerability database

A vulnerability could be as simple as the absence of a patch in an operating system, but an attacker could leverage this and conduct a major data breach.

To fix these software-based security vulnerabilities, ensure that you have proper patch management via automated forced updates. In addition, make technical recommendations to address physical vulnerabilities in case an attacker attempts to exploit your organization’s computing system or keycard access.

Step 5: Calculate the Likelihood and Impact of Various Scenarios on a Per-Year Basis

Now that you have identified information value, assets, threats, and vulnerabilities, the next step is to calculate how likely these cyber risks are to happen and their impacts if they occur.

Think about what protects your assets from these vulnerabilities, what the chances are that these threats might impact your assets multiple times, and how you can mitigate these risks.

For instance, imagine you have a database that stores all of your customers’ sensitive information such as credit card details, contact numbers, usernames, and passwords.

If this sensitive information is leaked, you could find your organization’s name in the media, which would have a drastic impact on your reputation and market valuation.

Not only that, but you could also face hefty penalties and fines for non-compliance with information security standards and for being unable to protect your customers’ data.

You expect that such a breach is unlikely to occur because you are already compliant with the security standards set by security agencies like Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).

Remember that compliance with security standards can only protect your data so far. Proper mitigation and cyber security defense strategies have to be in place to secure your data from attackers.

Ultimately, it depends on what information security protocols you follow and how you combat data breaches when they take place.

Step 6: Prioritize Risks Based on the Cost of Prevention vs Information Value

Use risk level as a basis to determine what actions should be taken to mitigate those risks.

Here is how you can categorize your risks:

High: An urgent and significant threat to the organization and risk mitigation should be done immediately.
Medium: A viable threat to the organization exists, and risk mitigation should be done within a specific period of time.
Low: Threats have a low impact on the assets, but may pose some issues later to the organization. Consider enhancing information security policies or deploying specific security software to address these threats.

You have now determined the value of the asset and whether a risk is critical or normal that can be dealt with easily.

You have to understand that if it costs more to protect an asset that has little to negligible impact on your organization, it may not make much sense to invest heavily into protecting it.

However, remember that not all assets could lead to monetary losses, but also damage your company’s reputation, so it’s important to consider this as well.

Step 7: Document Results in Risk Assessment Report

Develop a risk analysis report which describes the value, risk, and vulnerabilities for each threat.

Make sure that you also add the likelihood and impact of occurrence and mitigation recommendations. This will help management make informed decisions about policies, procedures, and budgets.

It is essential to the credibility of your entire risk assessment that the final document captures all the necessary information that you have collected throughout the assessment.

Having a cohesive risk analysis report also enables the assessor to communicate clearly with responsible individuals and stakeholders, helping them understand how these risks were discovered, and what they have to do to contribute to their mitigation.

A clear and cohesive risk analysis report helps establish guidelines and rules that provide answers to what vulnerabilities and threats could cause reputational damage and financial loss to your business, and how they can be mitigated.

Step 8: Implement and Monitor Security Controls

Now that you have your cyber security risk assessment report ready, implement and monitor security controls to minimize or eliminate the possibility of a vulnerability or threat.

You can implement controls through technical means, such as software or hardware, intrusion detection mechanisms, automatic updates, two-factor authentication, or encryption or through non-technical means such as physical mechanisms like keycard access.

Ensure continuous monitoring of these security controls to check whether or not they are performing as per requirements. Implementing security controls is not a one-step process where you can just install and forget them. You have to monitor these controls to ensure optimal performance.

Takeaways

Remember, your organization might have the best security policies in place, but with the constantly changing cyber security threats, you need to stay abreast of the latest threats that might attack your organization.

It is important for businesses to understand that a risk assessment can help them prevent breaches, avoid penalties and regulatory fines, and safeguard their valuable data.

At Cypress Data Defense, we can help your business perform a cyber security risk assessment to mitigate risks and improve your security posture.

How to Ensure Security in Your SaaS Application

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Enterprises are constantly faced with the task of balancing the advantages of productivity gains and lower costs against significant compliance and security concerns as they move their data and applications to the cloud.

With 94% of enterprises using the cloud, companies are looking at data and business processes such as records, transactions, pricing information, etc. as crucial for compliance policies and access control.

While software as a service (SaaS) is a great software distribution model with easy-to-use offerings that are already installed and configured in the cloud, there are several challenges with it.

What are those challenges?

For instance, SaaS applications often store sensitive information such as the credit card info of their customers, but this opens up application security concerns about potential SaaS security risks. A cybercriminal may attempt to conduct a data breach to gain access to this information or steal credentials for malicious reasons.

All of these factors pose a threat of significant application security vulnerabilities and data breaches, which could lead to legal and financial liabilities. This is why it is crucial for enterprises to ensure SaaS applications security- to protect their customer’s data from attackers and not fall victim to cyberattacks that may lead to legal or financial issues.

Here are some of the basic security controls every SaaS provider must have to secure their applications:

Best Practices to Protect Your SaaS Application

To successfully and securely protect your SaaS application, it is essential for companies to be committed to implementing best-in-class SaaS security.

By assessing application security risks and threats in the context of your SaaS applications, you can understand your application’s vulnerabilities.

Once you have identified vulnerabilities in your SaaS applications, you can not only protect the vulnerable hotspots but also adopt better solutions that secure your SaaS application and protect it from new SaaS security risks.

We’ve compiled a list of the best practices and ways to improve SaaS application security. These will give you a better idea of how you can implement security controls in your SaaS application while experiencing the benefits that cloud services offer.

Develop a Security Review Checklist

A data breach can be detrimental for your company and can take months, if not years, to recover from the damage caused by the breach

Further, if a data breach results in the loss of sensitive information, a decline in brand reputation, or the loss of confidence in your ability to keep your data secure, it can be a make or break situation for your company.

For this reason, it is imperative for enterprises to create a clear and concise security review checklist to ensure your network, devices, and users are in compliance with the required security standards.

What should a security review checklist include?

There are many things that could be on a security review checklist. Here are some broad categories that may cover many of the crucial cybersecurity aspects:

Management
- Create a security-first culture.
- Develop strong security policies, document them, and enforce them via training and technical controls.
- Ensure compliance with appropriate compliance frameworks along with own internal and external audits
Employees
- Enforce strong password policies and multifactor authentication.
- Conduct regular training on the latest cybersecurity threats and how they can be effectively handled.
- Host security awareness training for all employees to make security a shared responsibility.
Secure Data
- Classify data by usage and sensitivity and protect data appropriately for each classification level.
- Enable encryption.
- Enforce strong segmentation of data with separate encryption keys for each client data set.
- Secure networks, mobile devices, computers, and storage devices.
- Harden all devices.
- Routinely scan for vulnerabilities and deviation from the approved configuration.
Identify sensitive data and enforce stringent policies on its usage and access.
Enable multi-factor authentication for clients.
Ensure applications have Transport Socket Layer (TSL) to protect data transfers with strong algorithms, key lengths, and cipher configuration.
Enforce strong user access control with enforced least privilege access.
Ensure robust detective controls are in place to identify malicious/suspicious behavior.
Ensure strong audit logging is in place that feeds into a tuned incident and events manager.
Ensure a robust Incident Response plan and a disaster recovery plan are in place and are regularly tested.
Ensure you have a fully-secured Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) deployed with automated scanning, threat modeling and manual reviews by security experts.

A security review checklist may vary depending on the platform you use, but it is crucial for organizations to regularly review and update the checklist with the latest threats that will help them prioritize application security while maintaining quality.

Ensure Compliance of Certifications and Audits

It is essential for organizations to pay attention to certifications like Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). These certifications help companies ensure complete protection of their sensitive data.

How can an SaaS provider ensure compliance with certifications and audits?

For the PCI DSS, an SaaS provider has to perform thorough audits to ensure sensitive data is transmitted, processed, and stored in a secure manner.

It calls for a comprehensive security standard which entails requirements for cloud security policies, procedures, management, network architecture, software design, and other important protective measures.

Another essential certification for SaaS providers is the System and organization controls (SOC 2) Type II that comes into play to oversee regulatory compliance, vendor management processes, and internal risk management processes.

It ensures a cloud service is deployed and actively monitored to maintain high-security controls to ensure data security.

Both of these certifications will protect your organization from data breaches and ensure proper confidentiality and integrity is maintained.

Enforce a Data Retention Policy

Data retention is a critical aspect of SaaS application security. While many SaaS applications have varying retention policies, some applications do not have any retention options available.

It is imperative for businesses to have a data retention policy for their SaaS applications, especially when it comes to account management and subscriptions.

Why is this important?

You need to understand which data needs to be retained. While some data is required to be retained for a specific time period by law, other data might be important to your business but it may not necessarily be required for retention.

Data retention policies are not just helpful to create backups and free up space on your files but are often a major necessity for compliance.

In addition to the internal compliance rules of a company, there are several regulations and laws that require companies with cloud services to form a data retention policy.

For instance the PCI DSS and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Staying compliant with the laws and regulations is a big concern for businesses. Penalties for noncompliance can range from exorbitant fines to loss of reputation.

Ensure Secure Deployment

With dedicated SaaS vendors such as Amazon or Google, they take a shared responsibility of securing SaaS applications by providing secure infrastructure services that help ensure data segregation, data security, network security, etc.

What about self-hosted deployments?

In a self-hosted deployment, you will have to ensure that appropriate safety measures are taken and stringent application security policies are in place to protect your applications against DoS attacks and network penetration attacks.

If you choose to deploy your SaaS application on a public cloud, make sure that you follow the best practices and norms recommended by the public cloud vendor.

Encrypt Transmission Data End-to-End

Another effective way to secure your data in SaaS applications is by implementing encryption on transmission data.

Encryption enables you to encode your data to protect it from unauthorized or inaccessible users. It protects your data by providing integrity, non-repudiation, confidentiality, and authentication.

In a nutshell, even if an unauthorized user is able to access your data, they will not be able to decode it without the encryption keys.

To encrypt transmission data, make sure that all interactions with the servers take place over TLS (Transport Layer Security) transmission. The TLS should only terminate within the cloud service provider.

In addition to data in transit, data in storage should also be encrypted properly to secure sensitive information. Ideally, cloud service providers often provide field-level encryption, so you can select the fields you want to encrypt and ensure that your data is securely transmitted as well as stored.

Monitor User-Level Data Security

It is crucial for enterprises to monitor user-level data security to ensure compliance with internal and external application security standards.

Your cloud service provider may provide you with role-based access control (RBAC) features that enable you to specify user-specific access and other action permissions.

The idea is to give the right access to the right people ensuring that only authorized individuals can access data on SaaS applications.

Such a system enables an accurate, access control-based, enforced level of application security that segregates the users and how they can access data in the SaaS applications within an enterprise.

Integrate Real-Time Protection

SaaS applications provide great value to end users because of their easy setup and collaboration capabilities.

One of the most effective ways to secure your SaaS application is to integrate real-time monitoring which will provide greater visibility, control, policy management, and compliance of your SaaS applications to protect your data from exposure.

How does real-time monitoring help secure SaaS applications?

Attacks such as SQL injections, XSS, and account takeovers are some of the common breach methods used to attack SaaS products.

Real-time monitoring can help you distinguish between legitimate queries and malicious attacks through protection logic. Real-time protection tools can be integrated into the code at the development stage.

It helps you detect attacks early in the development process and mitigate SaaS security risks by taking appropriate measures.

Employ a Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

A traditional SDLC is focused on meeting requirements in terms of features and functions. However, the set of actions that take place during different phases of the SDLC might not always intrinsically comply with the set application security standards.

To address this issue, consider integrating security throughout all the phases of the SDLC, right from the beginning of the development stage.

The idea of embedding security early in the SDLC process\ is geared to have security baked into the process rather than bolted on.

By shifting the security left, i.e towards the beginning stages like the development stage, you can easily detect potential vulnerabilities or weaknesses in your applications early in the SDLC.

With this approach, you can create a secure application where you can implement best practices for secure coding, especially during code reviews.

Moreover, enforcing security guidelines early in the SDLC process helps prevent SaaS security vulnerabilities from creeping in and eliminates potential setbacks.

Ready to Ensure Security in Your SaaS Application?

SaaS offers a gamut of benefits such as reduced costs and improved operational efficiency. However, it is vital to adopt SaaS security practices, from compliance to secure deployment, and make sure that you address cloud security challenges upfront to secure your SaaS application.

While most of these concerns stem from our lack of visibility and control over how our data is being stored by our SaaS providers, it is important that you follow the best practices above to ensure cloud security in your SaaS application.

Differences Between Static Code Analysis and Dynamic Testing

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 15:04:10 GMT

With reports of data breaches and website vulnerabilities on the rise, securing the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) has become one of the top priorities of enterprises all around the world.

Software testing is a critical part of the software development journey. It determines the quality and performance of an application and identifies potential vulnerabilities in the code.

The most popular forms of security testing include static code analysis and dynamic testing. While both security testing methods help identify vulnerabilities in applications, they both have their own purpose, tools, and processes.

Let’s take a look at both methods to better understand the differences between static code analysis and dynamic testing.

Static Code Analysis

Static code analysis, or simply Static Analysis, is an application testing method in which an application’s source code is examined to detect potential security vulnerabilities. It is usually accomplished by testing the code against a set of standards and best practices that identify vulnerabilities within the application.

What Does it Cover?

A static code analysis often addresses code vulnerabilities and other code weaknesses. It often uses data tracing tools that find many vulnerabilities that often escape most human eyes.

Static Code Analysis Techniques

Automated tools- Static code analysis involves many automated tools that help detect potential vulnerabilities in the source code.
- Simple grep searches- Grep is a search utility that allows you to search for specific terms. Grep style searches can help discover information related to encryption, cryptography, SQL queries, URLs and sockets, and file read and writes. While powerful, these simple grep searches can lead to many false positives.
- Tools with data flow analysis- Automated tools like PumaScan, Fortify and Checkmarx actually trace data through the application and so it can detect when untrusted data is used in a trusted manner, e.g., when untrusted user input is sent to the browser unencoded (XSS vulnerability) or inserted directly into a SQL query (SQL Injection). This data flow analysis capability is essential for any serious assessment of the security of an application.
Static Code Review - A static code review is also known as white-box testing. It includes checking the overall security of the application to identify potential vulnerabilities and risks associated with it.

Where in the SDLC can we use Static Code Analysis?

Static code analysis should be performed at all stages of the SDLC once the development phase has begun. It should be incorporated into the SDLC before the unit/component/integration testing phases begin.

In most cases, the static code analysis results are incorporated as a quality check for code promotion in continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines.

Benefits

Static code analysis has plenty of benefits, and its ability to quickly discover weaknesses in the code and to comply with security standards helps reduce potential vulnerabilities.

What are some of the key benefits of using static code analysis?

Early detection of code vulnerabilities reduces the cost of debugging and fixing at a later stage in the SDLC.
It is conducted by trained security engineers who have strong knowledge about secure coding practices.
It is a highly scalable method which means it can run on multiple code bases and can be run repeatedly.
It is a fast and efficient way to identify vulnerabilities in the code such as SQL Injection, buffer overflow, etc.
Automated tools can scan the entire application source code with minimal effort.
The use of automated tools helps provide mitigation recommendations, thereby reducing research time.

Limitations

Despite its benefits, static code analysis has a few limitations that can impact your software development lifecycle process.

One of the major limitations of static code analysis is that the use of automation tools often gives a false assurance that everything is being validated. Often there are a large number of business rules, standards, and expectations involved that automated tools are not very efficient at analyzing in a code.

What are some of the key limitations of static code analysis?

It requires a large amount of time if done manually.
Automated tools often work with only a few programming languages.
Automated tools will provide false negatives and many false positives.
Automated tools can not scan the source code for compliance with business goals.
Security vulnerabilities like authentication problems, insecure use of cryptography, access control issues, etc. are very difficult to find automatically.

Dynamic Testing

Dynamic testing is the method of debugging an application’s source code in a run-time environment, i.e when the application is running. It is used to identify security vulnerabilities while the program is running.

Since the program can be run with multiple inputs, the scope of a dynamic assessment can get quite large.

What Does it Cover?

Dynamic testing can help discover a wide range of vulnerabilities such as input/output validation issues that could expose security vulnerabilities and make it vulnerable to SQL Injection (SQLi), Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), etc.

In addition to this, dynamic testing also helps identify security misconfiguration and other common issues that might impact the overall security of the application.

Automated dynamic testing allows users to continually scan applications as they evolve and facilitates the automatic detection of vulnerabilities. Automated alerts can be set in these tools that will send alerts and notifications once a vulnerability is detected.

Dynamic testing also includes manual test cases to detect vulnerabilities that are otherwise not easily discovered by automated tools such as session management issues, information leakage, authentication issues, access control, and more.

Where in the SDLC can We use Dynamic Testing?

Dynamic testing can be incorporated during multiple stages. In the pre-production stage, dynamic testing prevents error-prone code from going into the production phase. This can be used as a quality test with continuous integration (CI)/continuous delivery (CD) tools for code promotion. During the production stage, dynamic testing can help troubleshoot production issues quickly.

Benefits

Dynamic testing is a great method to identify vulnerabilities in a run-time environment. It helps identify issues in the application which thereby reduces the time to identify production issues.

What are some of the key benefits of using dynamic testing?

Identifies vulnerabilities in a run-time environment.
Automated tools offer flexibility on what to scan for.
Helps identify vulnerabilities that might not adhere to business context or standards.
Permits you to validate the findings from static code analysis.
Allows for the testing of the application without having access to the source code.
Can be applied to any application.

Limitations

Although dynamic testing helps validate the reports by static code analysis, which gives a better security assurance, there are still some limitations to dynamic testing.

What are some of the key limitations of dynamic testing?

Automated tools may produce false negatives and false positives.
There is a lack of trained professionals who can thoroughly conduct dynamic testing.

Takeaways

Static code analysis identifies issues in code, whereas dynamic testing uncovers issues in running applications that static analysis may not cover. Both of these testing methods go hand-in-hand. How and when you implement these testing methods in your SDLC depends on your requirements.

Announcing The New Normal

Thu, 16 Apr 2020 15:04:10 GMT

If you’re like most of us, you’re spending half your day washing your hands, and the other half trying to find a really great Zoom background to impress your coworkers. The days of the office (break rooms filled with snacks and free lunch on Friday!) sounds pretty good right now. Especially if you’re like me and keep finding the same terrible snacks every time I rummage through the cupboards.

What if that day never comes? How will it change if it DOES come? What do I do with the hundreds or thousands of people that I shoved out the door, and what issues I created shoving them out the door?

These are the questions we have been asking, and why we launched The New Normal. The New Normal is a friendly chat with industry-leading experts on what the transition looked like when being forced to work remotely practically overnight. What problems did they have? What solutions have they come up with to solve them? What problems do we have now, a month later? What do we think The New Normal is going to be in 6 months? How about a year from now?

We have been talking with our friends over at Lark Security about what challenges we both have been navigating with our customers, and what we think the new normal might look like. Most importantly, how does the "new normal" look for cybersecurity? So we decided to host a forum together where we can all share our experiences and collectively benefit from the lessons we are all learning.

The format is pretty simple, every other Thursday at 10 am MST, we will host a virtual meeting with a panel and a moderator. Guests are encouraged to ask any questions they have in the chat function of the meeting, and the moderator will get to them when appropriate. Some episodes will have sponsors that are relevant to the topic or cause.

Our first episode will be Thursday. April 30th, 2020. We are excited and honored to announce Kyle Shannon CEO of StoryVine will be joining us. More panel members are TBD at this point. If you would like to be a panel member or guest, submissions are welcome here. We are also looking for sponsors, so please reach out if you would like to be considered.

6 Cloud Security Challenges and How to Address Them

Wed, 15 Apr 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Cloud computing can provide significant benefits to organizations of all sizes. According to the CIO Agenda Survey by Gartner, expanding into the cloud technology (or expanding use of the cloud) are some of the top business priorities and a crucial element to achieving an organization’s mission.

Cloud services help enterprises expand their capabilities while minimizing labor costs and capital expenditures for adding new technology solutions.

What’s more?

It also helps them to increase their agility by instantly acquiring infrastructure resources and services when required.

However, in addition to the ample benefits of cloud technology, there are also challenges, some of which are security-related.

In 2019, over 540 million Facebook user records on the Amazon cloud server were exposed.

What does that mean?

That even large, successful companies face challenges while working with cloud infrastructures and sometimes end up falling victim to cyberattacks.

Security is often a bottleneck for cloud services, and it remains to be one of the top concerns of many professionals around the world. The risks and challenges associated with cloud security need to be properly addressed before you adopt a cloud solution.

The average cost of a data breach worldwide is close to $3.86 million, with an estimated cost of $148 per compromised record, according to a report. However, the numbers vary from one country to another: from $1.24 million in Brazil to $7.9 million in the USA.

Security challenges in the cloud can leave your data and organization at risk of cyberattacks that could have long-term, devastating effects.

Although most company owners believe that the cloud computing system is significantly better than their on-premise network, there are many cloud security challenges to address.

Like what?

Let’s take a closer look at the biggest cloud security challenges:

Challenge #1: Lack of Cloud Security Skills

As networks rapidly expand to include cloud technology, the increasing gap in cybersecurity skills becomes more prominent day-by-day. There is a major lack of security professionals equipped with the knowledge of cloud security and this is a big challenge for companies that are looking to adopt cloud services.

In fact:

A survey revealed that most companies are concerned about the security of their cloud infrastructure. In fact, about 16% of companies admitted they have overlooked critical security vulnerabilities due to a lack of skills to mitigate them.

What’s more?

Nearly 64% of senior executives said their companies are suffering loss in revenue because their teams lack the skills and expertise to ensure security in cloud services and carry out necessary tasks.

Finding a security professional with cloud security skills can be quite difficult. As a result, many systems deployed in cloud computing infrastructures tend to be weak and vulnerable to cyberattacks. The lack of skilled security professionals in cloud services can become a crisis for companies adopting cloud technology.

How Can You Address a Lack of Cloud Security Skills?

One way you can address the issue of lack of cloud security skills is by outsourcing to a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) or a cloud security company that is skilled and empowered with the best knowledge and tools to guide your organization or manage the cloud.

You can work with a MSSP from the initial phase of the implementation of cloud service until your internal security team is equipped and has reached a credible level to manage the cloud’s security on their own.

Another way to address this crisis:

Hold regular training sessions for your security professionals and empower them with the knowledge about cloud services. Through further training, and security awareness initiatives, you can push your employees to follow better security measures, which will strengthen the overall security of your organization.

Challenge #2: Insecure Interfaces and APIs

An application programming interface (API) is an essential element of the cloud infrastructure as it is the interface that provides direct or indirect cloud services and infrastructure to users.

Developers use APIs for provisioning, orchestrating, monitoring, and management.

The availability and security of general cloud services are tightly embedded with the security of these APIs. All too often, people use APIs but do not securely manage their tokens and keys. Be very careful with this.

From access control and authentication to activity monitoring and encryption, these interfaces must be designed securely to protect the cloud infrastructure from both malicious and accidental attempts to circumvent cloud security policies.

How Can You Prevent Insecure Interfaces and APIs?

One of the most basic ways to prevent insecure interfaces and APIs is by securing your authentication tokens and keys that are used for calling the APIs.

Furthermore, ensure that your teams follow a security by design approach throughout the development process.

By integrating cloud security early in the process, companies can have a better understanding of the overall security standpoint and implement enhanced security measures. This will ensure that the cloud infrastructure is designed with adequate authorization, authentication, and encryption.

To secure your cloud infrastructure from third-party suppliers, analyze their security model. Understand the dependency chain associated with the cloud computing interface and take necessary security measures.

Challenge #3: Data Privacy Issues

One of the biggest security challenges of cloud infrastructure is data privacy as data can be potentially anywhere on the cloud. You need to know where your data is being stored, (for example, in which countries), as different data privacy laws come into play.

For example:

Businesses often utilize third-party suppliers and companies as part of their service offering to users. But it’s critical to have appropriate mechanisms in place to prevent these third parties from exploiting customers’ data.

What’s more?

Companies need to be aware of where their data exists in the cloud to make sure that they are not breaking any privacy laws such as GDPR.

How Can You Prevent Data Privacy Issues?

It is critical to address concerns regarding data privacy and cloud security issues. By monitoring user access control and restricting access, there is a lot of control that can be levied to ensure enhanced data security of the stored data.

This will ensure that authorized users can only access specific cloud data that is needed for business functions.

But that’s not all.

You should also implement encryption for sensitive data to reduce the damage of cloud data breaches and other cyberattacks. By adding extra layers of data security such as multi-factor authentication, you can increase your level of cloud security significantly.

Challenge #4: Lack of Visibility/Control

The ease of implementing new servers, new services, etc. can also allow the cloud deployments to get out of control. Whether you’re dealing with public or hybrid cloud environments, a lack of visibility in the cloud infrastructure can mean a loss of control over critical aspects of data security and IT management.

A lack of visibility is one of the most important cloud security challenges as it affects the organization’s ability to enact incident response plans, verify the efficacy of their security controls, and properly assess information about their data, services, and users.

It is crucial for organizations to have a cloud usage policy with approved mechanisms for getting approved servers stood up, deployment processes, etc.

A lack of visibility in the public cloud also poses business risks in terms of compliance, governance, and security.

This is important for verifying how much visibility and control the cloud computing solution will offer.

How Can You Address a Lack of Visibility/Control Issues?

Maintain strong compliance and security controls across the entire cloud infrastructure platform: core network/hardware controls, data center controls, and operational security practices like change control, data disposal, and others.

These cloud security controls will help prevent a wide variety of teams from deploying all sorts of resources outside of the visibility of the security team.

Ensure that you have good auditing in place. Have strong controls for approved server images, processes for deploying. Furthermore, monitor cloud audit logs for unapproved usage.

Challenge #5: Cloud Service Hijacking

When a cloud account gets stolen or hijacked, the attacker may impersonate the account user to conduct malicious or unauthorized activities that may lead to the compromise of the data and trust the company has earned.

Cloud service hijacking at the enterprise level could be devastating, depending on what the attackers might do with the stolen information. Company integrity and reputation can be destroyed, sensitive data can be falsified or leaked causing significant costs to a business and its customers.

What’s more?

Organizations may face legal implications if a data breach causes the loss of the sensitive data of users such as personal information, credit card info, banking details, username, and passwords.

How Can You Prevent Cloud Service Hijacking Issues?

Implement strong authentication policies for accessing data on cloud services, especially those that deal with the sensitive information of the company or its customers. Make sure the IP addresses are restricted for cloud applications so that the users are only able to access corporate networks.

What else?

You should install multi-factor authentication such as dynamic one-time passwords delivered via biometrics, tokens, or other means. Ensure that sensitive data is encrypted while at rest and during transmission in the cloud. Also, have regular and secure backups to prevent the loss of data in case of data breaches.

Challenge #6: Lack of Compliance

Organizations are increasingly leveraging cloud infrastructures and services. That said, a hybrid infrastructure does pose some unique security challenges for companies in the government, financial, healthcare, and other regulated industries.

One of the major security challenges of a lack of compliance is that many enterprises are still manually testing to check whether they are compliant and meeting regulatory or custom security policies for auditing requirements and security compliance.

To begin with, such manual tasks are often complex, tedious, and error-prone processes. Especially when working with a combination of on-premises and heterogeneous systems in the cloud. This is because cloud computing systems often change very quickly, making traditional compliance mechanisms obsolete.

What else?

When configuration changes are made manually, they may go undetected, so these changes are not sharable, reproducible, or repeatable - all are crucial if you want to conduct a successful security audit.

How Can You Prevent Lack of Compliance Issues?

Companies should consider open-source tools and automate the scanning and rectification of security controls. The aim is to provide visibility into tasks and enable these tasks to be scalable - from individual systems to the container level to the hybrid infrastructure.

At the end of the day, it is crucial for cloud services to gain compliance assurance, as it helps identify and protect data and systems.

By identifying each control, you can map it to your risks or requirements, and document it. This will help you develop a compliance and security presence in the cloud.

Ready to Prevent These Cloud Security Challenges?

Cloud computing comes with plenty of benefits, but it also poses some significant security challenges that might jeopardize your organization’s credibility and put your customers’ data at risk of cyberattacks.

Once you understand what’s at stake and how to prevent cloud security challenges, you can make better proactive, informed decisions about IT infrastructures.

You can’t, however, implement these security controls overnight. They require a strategic approach and professional experience which can help reduce potential flaws, costs, and risks during the implementation process.

Data Storage Security: 5 Best Practices to Secure Your Data

Wed, 15 Apr 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Data is undoubtedly one of the most valuable assets of an organization. With easy-to-use and affordable options such as cloud-based storage environments, storing huge amounts of data in one place has become almost hassle-free. However, space is not the only concern for businesses any more.

With only 5% of companies’ folders properly secured, on average, data storage security is now one of the topmost priorities for enterprises.

First, it is important to understand the different security risks against data. There are threats related to physical access to the systems in which data is stored.

For example:

When selecting the physical location to store confidential data, make sure that the place is difficult to tamper with or retrieve data from it.

Besides physical threats, there’s a large scope of cybersecurity threats that target data stored on networks, servers, and other cloud infrastructure. To deal with such security breaches, here is a list of data storage security best practices that you should consider.

5 Data Storage Security Best Practices

1. Enforce Strong Data Storage Security Policies

Each organization should create, enforce, and update a comprehensive data storage security plan. To be effective, data storage security policies need to be implemented everywhere, from the office, mobile devices, storage devices, and throughout the on-premise infrastructure and across the web.

Data storage security policies help maximize your data security by helping you identify sensitive data, critical assets, and implementing strong security controls to monitor and safeguard each level of data classification.

Want to learn more about how to enforce data storage security policies?

Let’s take a closer look:

#Know What Data You Have

The first step of implementing data storage security policies is identifying what data you have. Ensure a clear understanding of the regulatory and privacy requirements of your organization. Assess the data you have, determine what is confidential and what might not be as important to your business.

By understanding the risks associated with different levels of data, you will be able to determine what needs more stringent security policies and what can be stored with basic cybersecurity measures.

For instance, sensitive information that is stored digitally such as intellectual property, personal identifying information about employees or customers including protected health information (PHI), social security numbers, and/or financial details like credit card details needs to be properly secured.

#Classify Your Data

What’s next?

Once you have identified what data you have, define your data classification via an approach that includes legal, business, and compliance policies.

Data classification helps companies to determine the business value of stored data, identify valuable information that may be exploited by cyberattackers as compared to other information, and make informed decisions about resource allocation to securely store data and protect it against potential threats.

What’s more?

It also ensures that proper security controls are applied to a particular set of stored data on the basis of their sensitivity and business value. Further, data classification helps organizations meet regulatory standards such as those within the GDPR for using specific information within a time period.

#Have Appropriate Controls for Each Level of Data Classification

Establish cybersecurity measures and define policy-based controls for each level of data classification. High-risk data requires advanced protection as compared to lower-risk data. By understanding what data you have and what needs to be protected, you can implement appropriate security measures based on associated risks.

2. Protect Your Management Interfaces

Often, companies set controls to protect data and data storage resources from unauthorized access while neglecting to secure management interfaces. This could allow a user to elevate their privileges or an attacker to set up their own credentials, enabling them to access data that they should not be able to.

One of the primary ways to protect your management interfaces is by enforcing strong authentication mechanisms such as multi-factor authentication and using least privilege access models. This way, only authorized users will be able to access stored data on the system.

In addition to this, reduce the exposure of management interfaces. You can achieve this with separate network interfaces on the managed infrastructure that is connected to an isolated management VLAN.

However:

If you can’t limit the exposure of your management interfaces, consider using a jump server. Jump servers, also known as bastion hosts, are used to provide strong and secure authenticated access.

Other management interfaces can then connect to a management network that is only reachable via the jump server. Remember that these servers need to be aggressively maintained and well-secured.

3. Implement a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Solution

One of the most effective data security best practices includes implementation of a data loss prevention (DLP) solution. A DLP identifies, protects, and monitors data in transit and data at rest in your storage areas such as laptops, desktops, mobile phones, or other devices.

By implementing a DLP solution, you can monitor the location and usage of data according to the security measures.

It can help prevent intentional theft and accidental disclosure by employees having access to sensitive data. According to the 2019 Data Breach Report, nearly 28% of attacks involved insiders. Thus, having a solution in place that protects your data from insider threats will help you strengthen data security.

Additionally, DLP also safeguards your data against external, malicious attacks. DLP can prohibit sensitive data transfers to removable media devices and provides the ability to apply security controls case-by-case.

For example:

If a security event is detected, DLP can instantly block access to a specific endpoint.

Requirements such as the GDPR enforces stringent compliance on organizations where if the company collects, stores, and uses sensitive data of their customers, it needs to meet the security standards under the GDPR.

Non-compliance can include hefty fines and penalties which can drastically impact an organization’s revenue and market reputation if a data breach occurs.

A DLP can help ensure proper security measures as well as policy templates that automate compliance, enable the collection and storage of sensitive data securely, and address specific requirements.

4. Monitor User Data Access Controls

Monitoring user data access controls is another great way to strengthen data security. It helps provide secure access to authorized users while also maintaining user privileges to ensure that users only access data that they need to complete their jobs.

Here are some actionable tips to monitor user data access controls:

Modify all default credentials. - Avoid the use of shared credentials, which increases the chances of data breaches and identity theft. - Ensure the privileged user has appropriate credentials such as strong password policies. - Implement the least privilege access model which ensures users only have the privileges they need to carry out their tasks. - If higher privileges are given to a user for a specific task, ensure that user rights are revoked automatically once the task is completed.

What else?

Ensure that logs cannot be modified once created by the same users that are being monitored. You can do this by hosting the log separate from the databases and restricting write access for those users.

Establish policies that define legitimate user behavior for the privileged user, and validate the user actions in real-time to ensure they comply with the policy. Verity that they are authorized, and in case of suspicious activity, send an alert or block the account until further authentication is provided.

5. Control Your Data in the Cloud

While the cloud offers ample benefits, there are several challenges associated with cloud security which poses a threat to data security.

Some of the most common challenges with cloud computing include:

Loss of sensitive data - Malware infections - Permanent data loss - Insider threats - Violation of existing regulatory controls

Controls on data in the cloud environment include governance policies to ensure that your data is securely stored in the cloud. To avail better privacy, look for cloud storage services that offer encryption of your data. This will add another layer of security to your data.

In particular, security measures for the cloud should include where different types of data are stored, who can access it, how can it be modified, and when it should be deleted.

Consider the following:

Integrate storage-specific policies with other security policies. - Address data protection and retention. - Incorporate storage considerations after identifying business-critical and sensitive data and their protection requirements. - Ensure all elements of storage infrastructure comply with policies. - Address data loss and recovery options. - Utilizing a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)

Takeaways

With the corporate world being highly interconnected now, it’s getting more challenging for companies to enforce compliance and secure their data.

Organizations of all sizes are adopting cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), as a way to give users a better experience and access to core business applications anywhere, anytime, and on virtually any device.

To fully protect your data from security threats and data breaches, you need flexible, yet effective data security policies that address concerns such as protection of sensitive data, suspicious user behavior, and ensuring compliance in day-to-day activities.

If you want to know more about data storage security best practices or want to conduct a cybersecurity audit, get in touch with us. We’re happy to help.

Major Limitations of Penetration Testing You Need to Know

Thu, 02 Apr 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Penetration testing attempts to exploit potential vulnerabilities to identify whether unauthorized access or other types of malicious activities are possible. Also known as a pen test, it is an authorized and controlled attack against your network or computer system to discover susceptible vulnerabilities.

A penetration test may involve attempted breaching of application systems such as frontend/backend servers and application protocol interfaces (APIs). Such targeted security breaches help expose vulnerabilities such as unsanitized inputs that are vulnerable to security breaches (e.g., code injection attacks).

With context to web application security, a pen test is often used to penetrate the application and to try to evade any web application firewall (WAF).

A pen test uncovers different aspects of security testing that may be lacking such as having proper security policies in place, for example, the lack of strong password policies or multi-factor authentication. A pen test provides the simulated experience of dealing with a security breach or an intrusion. It is similar to a fire drill, during which employees are trained to be wary of the possibility of security attacks and threats.

Here are some of the key benefits of penetration testing:

Uncovers existing weaknesses in your application(s), configurations, network infrastructure, and your system(s), etc.
Tests your cyber-defense capability to deal with cyber attackers and malicious activities
It has a great impact on the operations of a business as it exposes potential threats that may cause loss of accessibility or downtime
Maintains the credibility and trust of your stakeholders

All of these benefits seem to justify the effort that organizations put into penetration testing. Moreover, many companies conduct a pen test to adhere to the guidelines set by the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council to become PCI compliant.

Penetration testing has an array of benefits and helps identify any potential vulnerabilities, however, it alone can’t prevent data breaches. In reality, even the most carefully tested and analyzed infrastructure or applications could fall victim to security breaches or attacks.

The Limitations of Penetration Testing

With the existing cyber threat landscape increasing with evolving threats, and opportunistic exploits of faulty deployments and simple misconfigurations, pen testing alone is not sufficient.

Despite offering a gamut of benefits, there are some major limitations of penetration testing that can drastically impact your business.

Here are some of the major limitations of penetration testing that you should know:

Limitation of Time

Often, penetration testing is carried out as a timeboxed assessment that needs to be completed in a predefined time period. The testing team has to identify potential threats and vulnerabilities, and produce results within this specified time period.

Penetration testers also have to create a report at the end of the test which includes a description of the vulnerabilities identified, the methodology used, and an executive summary. They also have to take relevant screenshots at regular intervals and add them to the final report once the test has been completed.

In contrast, attackers are not constrained by time and they can have as much time as needed to identify and exploit more vulnerabilities. So timeboxed assessments like penetration testing give the attacker an edge over penetration testers, allowing them more time to exploit the application.

Hence, in addition to penetration testing, we recommend a white box assessment, a testing method that evaluates the internal structure, coding, and design of the software and the network, basically, the tester has full access to how the network, applications are designed. It helps identify internal security loopholes and broken or improperly structured flows in coding processes or in the network configuration. It also tests each function, object, and statement on an individual basis.

Limitation of Scope

Some organizations selectively perform security testing, which means they do not test everything. This may be due to a lack of resources, budget constraints, poor security policies, or other factors.

Similarly, penetration testers have limited scope and they often have to leave many parts of the system unchecked because of these constraints.

For instance, many times, exploits depend on the interactions of systems. So if the scope of a pen test is limited to one system, vulnerabilities that arise from the interactions of systems won’t be discovered.

This leads to an insufficient and poor quality penetration test that may cause damage to your organization at a later stage.

Limitation of Access

Often the testing team has restricted access to the target environment in a pen test.

For example, networks are often divided into segments and the penetration testing has access to only those specific segments that have servers or are accessible from the internet so that the team can simulate a real-work attack.

However, such a pen test with limited access will not be able to reveal configuration issues and potential vulnerabilities on its entire network.

An efficient way to detect vulnerabilities is to conduct white box testing along with penetration testing. This way, the tester will have complete information about the network, the application’s source code, the servers that it runs on, its detailed network infrastructure, and the IP addresses involved.

White box network vulnerability assessment helps to expose security threats by attacking the network from different angles. For applications, you can conduct code reviews that will help you discover security threats and weaknesses that might not be apparent from dynamic testing such as encryption algorithms, how passwords are stored, etc.

Limitation of Methods

Conducting a penetration test is intended to exploit systems, typically by doing things in ways that the system was not intended to handle.

During a penetration test, it is possible that the target infrastructure or system may crash. So the penetration testing team is restricted to use only a specific set of methods that avoid downtime or system crashes.

For instance, creating a distributed denial of service (DDoS) flood to divert a network or system administrator by using another method of attack is usually an ideal way for an attacker to bring down an organization.

However, such methods are likely to be avoided for penetration testing by teams as they tend to cause downtime of the system.

Other times, automated techniques are off limits and this may leave the system exposed to vulnerabilities that are prone to attackers such as script kiddies (skiddies) who are waiting to exploit such automation in internet-accessible systems.

These attackers are unskilled individuals who are constantly on the lookout to exploit well-known and easy to find weaknesses in computer systems to gain access to them without comprehending the consequences.

Limitation of Skill Sets of a Penetration Tester

The success and quality of the penetration test are directly proportional to the experience and skills of the penetration testing team. Each penetration test can be divided into three broad categories: system, network, and application penetration testing.

A penetration tester who is skilled and experienced in network penetration testing might not be able to perform a successful application penetration test. With continuously evolving and upgrading technologies, it is becoming more difficult to find a skillful person who can conduct a high-quality penetration test.

Meanwhile, more skilled attackers who have time can potentially do a lot of damage to the system.

While a tester may have in-depth knowledge about Apache web servers, they may be less experienced with Internet Information Services (IIS) server. Having experience with the same technology plays a vital role in the success of a penetration test.

Limitation of Custom Exploits

Often times, the penetration testing team is required to think out-of-the-box and create custom exploits. For instance, in some highly secure environments, normal pen testing tools and frameworks are of little use.

So the penetration team has to build custom exploits that are effective in secure environments as well. Creating a custom exploit also entails writing scripts manually to define the path of the intrusion to reach the target for conducting a pen test.

This can be extremely time consuming and it is not an efficient way to conduct regular security tests. Additionally, it is not a part of the skill set of most penetration testers. Manually writing scripts and creating custom exploit code can dramatically impact the budget and time taken to conduct the test.

Limitation to Experiment

Penetration testers are allowed to use only client-approved exploitation frameworks and tools. Since not every tool is all-in-one and they may lack some features or miss some parts of the test, the testing team will have to find alternatives to carry out the test effectively.

Moreover, stringent instructions from the client and higher-level management can restrict the penetration team’s ability to experiment with the approved scope. On the other hand, attackers are free to work their way around security tests and create new paths to attack.

Takeaways

Penetration testing plays an important role in finding security vulnerabilities. However, you should be aware of its limitations as they can have a massive impact on your organization. Eliminating penetration testing is not an ideal solution, but you can always combine it with other effective security methods and processes to carry out proper tests.

What Do You Need to Know About Continuous Testing in DevOps?

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Current fast-paced business conditions have made it crucial for companies to adopt techniques like DevOps that promote better collaboration and continuous delivery.

With the increasing need to release quality software in a short amount of time while maintaining security, more organizations are integrating continuous testing as a part of their DevOps culture.

Continuous testing in DevOps eliminates the silos between the development, operations, and testing teams. It runs parallel performance tests to boost software testing execution speed thereby reducing time to market.

Further, it incorporates security tests as a core element to ensure that security isn’t compromised due to rapid development processes.

What is Continuous Testing?

Continuous testing is a software testing technique that aims for testing early and often throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC) using automated tools and processes. It promotes better collaboration across different teams and helps them understand ways to ensure the quality and reliability of every software release.

Various tests including integration, regression, performance, system, user acceptance, functionality, security, and others are executed automatically in continuous testing. These automated tests help teams receive instant feedback to quickly identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities or risks throughout the SDLC.

The Importance of Continuous Testing

With the marketplace getting more competitive, businesses need to ensure they are providing a seamless user experience while maintaining security to their consumers with every software and product release.

A crucial element of the SDLC to provide better user experience along with more secure applications is continuous testing (CT).

How is continuous testing related to DevOps?

CT fits in perfectly with the two core concepts of DevOps - continuous development and a source of uninterrupted feedback. It has the ability to be seamlessly integrated into the process of accelerated development in DevOps.

Since DevOps consists of collaboration between the development, operations, and QA teams, continuous testing enables teams to work cohesively. With continuous development and testing of software, and frequent feedback with quick bug fixes, companies can easily align their development processes with the demands of their businesses.

Organizations can notably improve the speed of software delivery since the changes made in the software can be set up rapidly in production.

How does continuous testing ensure better security in DevOps?

Continuous testing ensures continuity throughout the SDLC by enabling different teams involved in the SDLC to contribute across the entire process as and when required. It also shifts security to the left by performing security tests early in the SDLC process to reveal potential vulnerabilities and security weaknesses in the application as the development progresses.

Hence, every member becomes responsible for maintaining security and there is continuity in development.

Further, continuous testing aims at repetitive and automated security testing of software, from the initial stage of development to the final stage of release. Additionally, tools such as Selenium and others help achieve comprehensive coverage.

Security testing is an integral part of continuous testing, given the growing need for efficient code-related risk management. It helps ensure better security of the application by early detection of potential vulnerabilities.

Continuous testing also establishes a support system that ensures the safety of the application from unexpected attacks and changes, which can be encountered post-deployment as well. In accelerated development processes, such as in DevOps, continuous testing ensures that the system is stable and recoverable in the case of software failures as well.

How is Continuous Testing Different from Automated Testing?

While continuous testing consists of automated tests, it isn’t the same as automated testing. Continuous testing and automated testing are two different concepts with different goals.

Automated testing is a process during which you use specified automated tools or software to automate a set of tasks. The primary goal of automated testing is to perform repetitive, identical tasks that a machine can perform faster with fewer mistakes.

Continuous testing is a software testing method that focuses on achieving continuous quality while identifying potential vulnerabilities and addressing them. To achieve its goal of improved and continuous quality, it can employ any number of tools and/or practices.

Continuous testing goes beyond test automation and entails a variety of practices including cultural changes and tooling that help detect and mitigate risks early in the SDLC. However, automated testing uses software to control the execution of tests to achieve velocity and volume across a variety of different tasks.

Both have their own benefits and challenges. Ultimately, it depends on the purpose of your testing and requirements.

How to Perform Continuous Testing in DevOps

Continuous testing should be integrated into your continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline. Set up test suites at every point where code is modified, merged, or released.

That way, instead of running test suites all at once, you can run them at specific points. It will help reduce your effort and time but still maintain quality standards.

Here are some steps that you can use to perform continuous testing in DevOps:

Define tests early: Create clear and concise test data requirements to avoid delays. Use behavior-driven development (BDD), model-based testing, and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) so that all requirements are properly documented. Test cases and test scripts need to be clearly defined ahead of time to enable continuous testing from the beginning stage of the code production.
Optimize testing processes: Only test code that has been recently modified, merged, or updated. Use visual models that enable various paths to be identified and optimized so that test suites are run only on selected code areas while providing maximum coverage.
Shift-lift security testing: Ensure that tests are run earlier in the SDLC to identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities and risks. Developers should test cases as they go, with test automation including performance testing, functional testing, security testing, and monitoring.
Provide test environments: To achieve efficient continuous testing, provide virtualized test environments. Reduce wait times and eliminate blocks by providing complete test environments with developer-friendly tools that do not require in-depth knowledge about testing or security. These test environments should contain test data on demand enabling teams to perform comprehensive tests as and when required.
Adopt test automation: Leverage test automation as it increases the speed and promotes faster delivery to the production environment. Automate as much as possible throughout the SDLC to minimize human effort, time, and mistakes.
Integrate performance testing into the delivery pipeline: While other testing types such as integration, system, functionality, user experience are critical, ensure that you integrate performance testing as well as it is a key part of continuous testing. Performance testing helps you analyze the speed, stability, and responsiveness of your application.

Takeaways

Traditional testing techniques are often considered bottlenecks to the software development life cycle. Continuous testing in DevOps offers a competitive advantage to companies, enabling them to deliver better quality products to their customers in a shorter period of time while maintaining security standards. Ensure that you have a strategic test plan in place before you integrate continuous testing in your SDLC.

Effects a Data Breach Can Have on Your Business in the Long Term

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 15:04:10 GMT

In today’s cybersecurity landscape, businesses are increasingly becoming victims of data breaches. Worldwide spending on cybersecurity is estimated to reach a whopping $133.7 billion by 2022 and it’s not a surprise that businesses are more focused on building a better security culture.

Data breaches don’t just expose sensitive information, the attackers can burrow into the entire organization’s network or hack into their database and perform malicious activities.

A data breach could lead to a loss of data including sensitive information such as financial records, credit card info, personal details, or confidential data like contracts and agreements between vendors and companies. That data, if compromised, could cause havoc for the victim organization.

In fact, in the first half of 2019, a data breach exposed about 4.1 billion records which caused long-term damaging effects for the victim organizations.

When a data breach occurs, it costs the organization more than just money - it can cause severe damage to your organization’s reputation leading to a decline in your brand reputation, value, and relationships with your customers.

With cybercriminals using more sophisticated methods to attack enterprises and leveraging the latest technologies such as automation and artificial intelligence, data protection has become more challenging.

It is imperative for businesses to understand the consequences of a data breach and how it could impact their entire organization. It will help them take the necessary steps to mitigate their potential vulnerabilities and risks that could otherwise put their company and its customers at risk of a data breach.

We have compiled a list of the most severe long-term effects of a data breach.

Hopefully, this will help you get a better idea of how potentially severe a data breach could be for your company as well as show you the need for cybersecurity.

Predictive vs. Adaptive SDLC: What is the Difference?

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 15:04:10 GMT

Organizations are different from one another. Projects and business strategies differ from one another. Make sure your development approach matches your organization and project. Many project managers are moving away from conventional predictive Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) methodologies toward adaptive SDLC methodologies.

Should you?

To determine this, you should have a clear understanding of predictive vs. adaptive SDLC approaches and identify the best methodology for your organization and your project.

Predictive Software Development Life Cycle: An Overview

As the name suggests, predictive SDLC assumes you can predict the complete workflow. It involves fully understanding the final product and determining the process for delivering it. In this form of project life cycle, you determine the cost, scope, and timeline in the early phases of the project.

One of the most common predictive models is the waterfall model. It assumes various phases in the SDLC that can occur sequentially, which implies that one phase leads into the next phase. In simple words, in waterfall model, all the phases take place one at a time and do not overlap one another.

While the waterfall model is quite simple and easy to use and understand, it also entails a few drawbacks that could drastically impact your project.

Since the waterfall model follows a sequential approach, once an application is in the testing phase, it becomes difficult to go back and debug it in the development stage.

Pros of Predictive SDLC

It is easy to understand and follow as each phase is initiated after another phase is completed.
The laid down instructions and concise workflow makes it easier for the developers to work within a specified budget and timeframe.
It enables organizations to assume the expected project budget and timelines (IF all goes as planned).
Each stage in the predictive SDLC has specific timelines and deliverables, which makes it easier for teams to operate and monitor the entire project.

Cons of Predictive SDLC

Working software is produced at a later stage in predictive SDLC, which leads to delayed identification of bugs and vulnerabilities in the application.
Organizations often have to bear additional costs of delayed applications if bugs are discovered in the testing phase of the project.
It is not the ideal SDLC model for complex projects.
Predictive SDLC is not suitable for dynamic projects that entail flexible requirements or uncertainty in the end product.

The main concern of a predictive SDLC approach is to develop and maintain the specifications of the final product. This makes it ideal for projects where all the requirements are defined and well understood with a clear vision of the final product.

In predictive SDLC, there are minimal expected changes as the work is already predictive and well-known. The team has a clear idea of exactly where the project is heading and how to follow the sequence.

On the other hand, a predictive approach can be extremely rigid, requiring developers to maintain strict and rigorous standards throughout the life cycle. Since the sequence of the work is already predetermined, any subsequent changes can be very costly and time-consuming.

Adaptive Software Development Life Cycle: An Overview

Adaptive SDLC approaches have a mix of incremental and iterative development. It involves adding features incrementally and making changes and refinements according to feedback. In other words, the work can easily adapt to the changing requirements based on new feedback received from the client.

Agile and other iterative methodologies fall under the umbrella of adaptive SDLC. A key element of adaptive SDLC methodologies is that while it defines certain milestones throughout the SDLC, it also allows flexibility to achieve them.

Adaptive SDLC, such as Agile, focuses on achieving the desired end goal by quickly adapting the dynamic business requirements. It puts more focus on the present requirement and leaves room for future scope of the project.

Pros of Adaptive SDLC

Adaptive SDLC entails iterative, evolutionary and incremental methodologies which offer flexible guidelines and easy flow of work.
Methodologies such as Agile are efficient in nature and enhance team collaboration.
Short feedback loops lead to quick adaptation to changing requirements.
Reduces potential vulnerabilities and bugs at the deployment stage as the application is frequently tested while in the development phase.
It focuses on delivering high quality applications while maintaining technical excellence.
Encourages different teams to work together on a project, increasing face-to-face interactions and building better work environments.

Cons of Adaptive SDLC

It demands for extensive client/user involvement throughout the SDLC.
Various teams have to work together continuously while working with adaptive SDLCs, and this involves numerous interactions. Continuous communication between teams can be time consuming and require more commitment.
Since adaptive SDLC requires close collaboration between organizations and their clients, lack of commitment from either of the sides could impact software quality.
Frequent changes are adopted just in time for development which might result in less detailed documentation.

Adaptive SDLC approaches are best for projects that have the potential for significant changes in scope or that there is uncertainty in what is desired. You may need to adapt to the changing demands of the client for these projects.

The adaptive SDLC methodology is typically faster than predictive SDLC approaches. This is primarily due to the fact that few projects are sufficiently understood to really use a predictive SDLC methodology. When requirements are not sufficiently understood, issues are identified late in the lifecycle and this leads to expensive re-work.

Which is Better?

Since each approach has its uses for specific types of projects, there is no clear-cut decision as to which of them is better. The choice depends largely on the project type, your strategies, and organizational needs.

It’s best if you carefully analyze predictive SDLC and adaptive SDLC and weigh the pros and cons for each project rather than relying on a uniform approach for all projects.

Predictive SDLC approach may be a better choice if:

You’re working on a project that the team is already familiar with. The team will be more productive since they already know exactly what is expected out of the project and what they are supposed to do.
There is little chance of changes in the project parameters. This is crucial because any subsequent changes toward the end of the project will be very complicated and expensive to implement in a predictive approach.
There are very well defined and understood requirements of what the final deliverable product should be.
You have a thoroughly documented project development process to work with.
You prefer predictability and like to have a clear idea of possible/expected changes beforehand.
The project manager isn’t too experienced with other methodologies. In this case, things would go more smoothly if they worked within a familiar methodology that they have tons of experience with.

Adaptive SDLC approach may be a better choice if:

You’re working on a project with evolving or undetermined parameters. An adaptive approach gives you room to make adjustments based on new or updated parameters.
There is no rigid expectation as to how the final product might turn out. In other words, you should use the adaptive approach only if the project is innovative and/or exploratory in nature.
You’re working with a flexible timeline.
You work in a rapidly evolving industry.
The project manager is experienced with adaptive SDLC methodologies.

Bottom Line

As you can see, both predictive and adaptive SDLC approaches have unique benefits so it would be a huge mistake to use only one of them for all your projects. Carefully assess each project demands and specifications to see which approach you should take.

Got any questions about predictive vs. adaptive SDLC? Let us know in the comments.

What are the Differences Between DevOps and Agile? (Infographic)

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 15:04:10 GMT

People are often confused by DevOps and Agile in the software development industry.

You may have a lot of questions such as:

How are DevOps and Agile methodologies different?
Is one more secure?
Which one should I use? (Just one or both)?

This infographic will break it down and simplify it for you.

Let’s start by understanding each one separately.

What is Agile?

This methodology takes an iterative and incremental approach to development.

Involves producing release cycles on a continuous basis.
Breaks the software down into small functional deliverables for customer approval
Addresses the gaps in communication between customer and developer.
Small and rapid releases, customer feedback, and collaboration are the focus of this model.
Aims to bring agility to development.

What is DevOps?

This approach to operations focuses on communication, collaboration, integration, and deployment.

Promotes collaboration between operations and development to deploy releases to various environments.
Automation, continuous feedback, discipline, and process development are the highlights of this model.
Development teams make small but frequent updates to the production software which are often automatically deployed to environments
Aims to bring agility to operations and deployments.

Top Differences between DevOps and Agile

Features	DevOps	Agile
Purpose	Managing end-to-end engineering processes	Managing software development projects
Processes/Practices	Processes like Continuous Deployment (CD), Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Testing (CT), etc.	Practices like Agile Kanban, Agile Scrum, etc.
Key Focus Area	Equal priority on timeliness and quality	Main priority on timeliness and integration with stakeholders
Goal	To address the gap between operations and development and testing teams	To address the gap between development and testing teams and customer needs
Task	Focuses on constant testing and delivery	Focuses on continuous manageable product improvements
Implementation	A core focus on collaboration with no commonly-accepted framework	Range of tactical frameworks including Sprint, Scrum, and Safe
Release Cycles/ Duration	Smaller release or continuous-release cycles with immediate feedback; deadlines and benchmarks built around major releases	Development is carried out in units of “sprints”; each sprint usually lasts about two weeks could take a month or less
Scope of Work	Agility and the need for automation around deployment processes	Agility around the development and feature delivery processes
Feedback	Comes from internal team using monitoring tools	Comes from customer
Cross-Functionality	Development and operations work together; not separately	Any team member is free to take up any required task within the project
Automation	Primary goal in DevOps as it helps maximize efficiency	No emphasis on automation
Advantage	Allows rapid and automated deployment of new features, minimizes risk of deployment issues	Capability to accommodate changes during the development phase as features are prioritized
Challenge	Difficulty integrating build and deployment processes	Difficulty estimating effort and requirements in the early stage of development

Which is Better?

The simple answer is neither. Each of these methodologies fills a different purpose and they are often used together.

Agile allows development teams deliver functionality more frequently.

DevOps allows more efficient build and deployment of delivered functionality to environments like QA, Pre-Prod, and Production.

In either case, secure coding and security testing are not implicitly part of the model.

This can cause a huge disconnect between developers and management in terms of application security.

Since security should be a major concern, it’s crucial that you use secure SDLC solutions in both development and deployment models to ensure your deployed applications are secure.

These solutions should:

Easily integrate into your existing process.
Reduce the overhead on your security team.
Support early integration to minimize redevelopment costs.

6 Web Application Vulnerabilities and How to Prevent Them

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 15:04:10 GMT

One of the biggest fears for development managers is not identifying a vulnerability in their web application before an attacker finds it. Web application vulnerabilities leave you susceptible to security attacks during which valuable customer and company data could be at risk. As a result, you will incur huge financial losses while your reputation suffers serious damage.

The good news is that these web application security threats are preventable. roper knowledge of the most common web application vulnerabilities is the key to prevention. While you may conduct automated scans and regularly test for any web application vulnerabilities, those efforts will be in vain unless you know what to look for.

This makes it crucial to understand web security vulnerabilities inside out – right from how a web application gets targeted to what kind of vulnerabilities to look for and how to prevent them. This post is going to help you do exactly that.

How Web Application Vulnerabilities Affect Companies

First, let’s try to gain a better understanding of how exactly these website application vulnerabilities can affect a company. This will help you understand just how harmful these security attacks can be and why you should prioritize preventing them.

One of the biggest, most harmful web application security threats is sensitive data exposure. It even ranks among the OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities. It involves compromising important data that should have been protected. This includes data like passwords, credentials, personally identifiable information, social security numbers, credit card numbers, health information, etc.

This is one of the most targeted web application vulnerabilities by hackers since there’s a prospect for financial gain for them. They could sell this data or use it themselves to conduct fraud, identity theft, etc.

There are tons of ways for hackers to steal sensitive data through web security vulnerabilities:

They may look for SQL injection flaws to retrieve decrypted credit card numbers.
They could exploit insecure wireless networks to seal a user’s session cookie.
Attackers could even retrieve sensitive files from the server using a file download vulnerability, or upload malicious files to target your users!

In some cases, you may even encounter Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). This is one of the most widespread website application vulnerabilities and involves utilizing the website as a propagation method. Hackers would inject malicious client-side scripts and modify how the website functions or how it is displayed.

An XSS attack could infect your visitors’ devices with malware or have them recruited into large botnets. It could mislead your visitors and damage your credibility and reputation, which can be extremely difficult to rebuild.

These are just a few ways in which hackers can exploit web application vulnerabilities and cause serious harm to your company and its customers. But even from this, you can clearly see just how damaging these attacks can be and how crucial it is to prevent them. We need to take web application security threats seriously and turn our development teams into security champions.

Understanding the Common Web Application Vulnerabilities

Now let’s take a look at some of the most common attacks that hackers might attempt on your website. Knowing these common web application vulnerabilities will help you identify them faster and fix them more easily.

#1: SQL Injection

Many hackers start with an attempt to gain access to the database through SQL injection attacks. This is when the attacker inserts malicious SQL statements into form fields and other injection points, with the intention of gathering information from and controlling the database. They can use this information to access and modify or even destroy the information, and to attack the underlying system.

Attackers typically use these attacks to collect vital customer information such as their contact information, passwords, or even credit card info. They may even exploit these web security vulnerabilities to change the price of a product, for instance. Advanced attacks can even allow them to control the database server and the operating system.

#How to Prevent It

Prepared statements with parameterized queries can mitigate SQL-related web application vulnerabilities. A prepared statement helps to sanitize the input and ensures that it is considered as a string literal in SQL rather than as part of the SQL query. In other words, the database can tell the difference between SQL data and SQL code. So the code is no longer vulnerable to SQL injection attacks as the query is less vulnerable to tampering.
Migrating to Object Relational Mapping Tools (ORMs) is another excellent option. However, most ORMs allow non-parameterized queries in addition to performing parameterized queries. As such, it’s crucial to carefully use the frameworks keeping this in mind.
Make the most of LIMIT and other SQL controls within your queries so that even if an SQL injection attack does occur, it can prevent the mass disclosure of records.

#2: Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)

As mentioned earlier, cross-site scripting or XSS is one of the most popular web application vulnerabilities that could put your users’ security at risk. These attacks inject malicious code into the running application and executes it on the client-side.

The goal of XSS attacks is to send this malicious code to other users, sometimes infecting their devices with malware or stealing sensitive information. This type of website application vulnerability can give the attacker full control of the user’s browser and can be extremely dangerous to any website.

#How to Prevent It

Modern frameworks have made it a lot easier to escape untrusted user input and mitigate XSS attacks. AngularJS, React JS, and Ruby on Rails are some of the latest, most effective frameworks to prevent these web application vulnerabilities. These frameworks can automatically escape user input and help mitigate XSS attacks by design, although they do have limitations.
Avoid implementing a blacklist, instead favor of a whitelist, because blacklists are less effective at preventing web security vulnerabilities. An attacker who knows what they’re doing can easily bypass a blacklist filter.
The ultimate solution to prevent these web application vulnerabilities is output encoding. This involves converting untrusted user input into a safe form so the input is displayed to the user as data without being executed as code in the browser. This means that special characters will be translated into an equivalent form that the browser will no longer find significant.
It’s also important to understand that output encoding depends on the context of where data is being output. For instance, you may have HTML contexts, HTML entity contexts, HTML attribute contexts, CSS contexts, JavaScript contexts, and more. As such, you will need to apply context-sensitive encoding when render the page for the browser.
Enable a Content Security Policy (CSP), which can be very effective to help mitigate Cross-Site Scripting vulnerabilities.

#3: Authentication Failure

Authentication-related web application vulnerabilities occur when there’s an improper implementation of adequate user authentication controls. This puts user accounts at risk of being breached. Attackers may exploit these web security vulnerabilities to gain control over any user account or even over the entire system.

One of these vulnerabilities is Credential Stuffing, where an attacker will test a list of valid passwords and usernames gleaned from another breach or attack until they manage to find a valid combination and gain access.

Another common vulnerability is a Brute Force attack, in which the attacker tries every possible character combination until they find a valid one.

Session hijacking is another common attack that can occur as a result of authentication failure. This is when there is a failure to properly invalidate session IDs, allowing attackers to exploit an authenticated session of a legitimate user.

#How to Prevent It

One of the essential steps to avoid these web application vulnerabilities is to allow enough time for developers to test the code before it gets deployed to production. External security audits can also help ensure that you apply the best practices of website security.
Avoid deploying with default credentials, especially for admins.
Wherever possible, make sure you implement multi-factor authentication to make your system less vulnerable to the attacks mentioned above.
Put a limitation or delay on failed login attempts. Make sure you log all failures and notify administrators when there’s an attack attempt.
Avoid unnecessarily restricting input size. If you allow more characters, there are fewer chances for attackers to guess the right password.
Have some form of lockout in place to prevent brute force attacks and minimize these web application vulnerabilities.
Use adaptive hashing algorithms like bcrypt, pbkdf2, argon2, etc. to salt passwords and hash them before storing them in the database
Implement weak-password checks for better password security. This would include testing new or changed passwords and comparing them against a list of compromised or weak passwords. Use of a service to check for compromised passwords (such as Have I Been Pwned) helps to automate this functionality and keeps the list of compromised passwords up to date as new attacks occur.

#4: Security Misconfiguration

Security misconfigurations provide attackers with an easy way into your website, making it one of the most critical web application vulnerabilities that you need to prevent.

Unused pages, unpatched flaws, unprotected files and directories, and default configurations, are some of the security misconfigurations that attackers can leverage to gain unauthorized access.

Every level of your application stack can be vulnerable to security misconfigurations. This includes your web server, platform, database, network services, storage, frameworks, application server, and more.

If attackers manage to exploit these web application vulnerabilities, they can access sensitive information and take control of user and admin accounts.

#How to Prevent It

Make sure you use encrypted (HTTPS) connections to transfer data and information between the users and the application.
Have a repeatable hardening process that you can quickly and easily deploy on another environment. This will save time in setting up a new and secure environment as you’ll be able to automate the process.
Perform all remote admin tasks through secured channels to minimize these web application vulnerabilities. Even if you do have to use protocols that don’t support strong encryption, make sure you activate them over a secondary encryption channel such as IPSEC, or TLS.
Regularly conduct file integrity checking to ensure that there haven’t been any unauthorized changes to critical files. Use file integrity checking tools that can accept routine and expected changes while alerting you of any unexpected or unusual changes.
Have an automated process in place to regularly verify the effectiveness of your settings and configurations in every environment. You can use an automated configuration monitoring tool that can alert you of any unauthorized changes. This will help you identify these web application vulnerabilities before they cause any damage.
Keep your platform minimal and avoid adding unnecessary features, samples, documentation, and components. If you have unused features and frameworks in the platform, it’s best to remove them to prevent web application vulnerabilities.

#5: XML External Entities

An XML external entity attack, also known as an XXE, or an XML injection attack, is another class of vulnerabilities you should watch out for. These types of attacks occur when attackers exploit a weakly-configured XML parser. Through such attacks, attackers can inject additional data, access confidential data, and execute applications and create remote tunnels (shells).

XML external entity attacks can also result in remote code execution, Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF), and more. By default, most XML parsers are prone to these attacks. This leaves it up to the developers to ensure that their web application is free from these web application vulnerabilities.

#How to Prevent It

Completely disabling Document Type Definitions (DTD’s), also known as External Entities, is the safest way to prevent XXE attacks. This secures the parser against DoS attacks. However, it may not always be possible to completely disable DTDs. In this case, you need to disable external document type declarations and external entities in a specific way for each parser.
Whenever possible, you should try using less complex data formats like JSON. It’s also good to avoid serialization of sensitive data to avoid these website application vulnerabilities.
Implement a positive, server-side method to validate, sanitize, and filter input. This will help prevent the occurrence of hostile data within your XML documents, nodes, and/or headers and help you avoid XXE-related web application vulnerabilities.
Patch or upgrade all the XML processors and libraries that the application or its underlying OS is using.
While the best solution is to use manual code review for critical functionality in large and complex applications, you should also use SAST tools to detect XXE in source code.
Use XSD validation or an equivalent alternative to validate the incoming XML structure.

#6: Broken Access Control (Authorization Failure)

Access control helps you control what sections of a website and what application data different visitors can access.

For instance, if your website is a platform for different sellers to list their products, they will need some kind of access to add new products and manage their sales. However, not every visitor will need that level of access since most of them are visiting your site to buy products.

As such, having a broken access control opens up your site to web application vulnerabilities, which attackers can exploit to access sensitive information or unauthorized functionality. They might even use these attacks to make modifications to access rights and user data.

#How to Prevent It

It’s crucial to maintain a security-first policy when developing and configuring software.
Except for public resources, deny access by default.
Make sure you apply protection horizontally (across all data) and vertically (across all levels of access privileges). Vertical protection involves employing the least privilege concept wherein access is granted only in accordance to their
Centralize all authorization decisions to minimize the occurrence of access-related web application vulnerabilities.
Instead of letting users freely create, read, modify, or delete any record, use model access controls to enforce record ownership. Remove their ability to read or modify data from other users.
Implement a one-time access control mechanism that you can reuse through the 1.
Set limitations to API and controller access to reduce the risk of attacks by automated tools.
Invalidate JWT tokens and user sessions on the server after logout.
Disable webserver directory listing and also prevent web roots from storing backup files and file metadata.

Final Thoughts

These are some of the most common web application vulnerabilities that you should watch out for and try to prevent. Doing so will help you avoid a large number of web application security threats.

Combined with your regular tests and automated scans, you should be able to utilize this list to minimize the risk of security threats and ensure better security of sensitive information.

However, it’s important to note that these aren’t the only vulnerabilities you should be aware of. There are plenty of other harmful web application vulnerabilities such as insecure cryptography, insufficient logging and monitoring, and using components with known vulnerabilities.

Being aware of all of them will help you enhance security and protect valuable data against security threats.

7 Web Application Security Best Practices You Need to Know

Thu, 26 Sep 2019 15:04:10 GMT

Web app security is not something that you can bolt on after developing your app, it should be a core part of the app development process. Web applications are by design, available to others and are very much exposed to many potential threats. As such, you need to ingrain security features within each component of your app and make security a part of each phase of the software development lifecycle to ensure that it is safe from threats.

There are several web application security best practices that you can follow to achieve this. These web application security best practices ensure that there are multiple layers of security incorporated in your app and development and testing processes.

In this post, we will list seven of the most important web application security best practices that you should follow to protect your apps from threats. So, let’s take a look at these app security best practices and why they are important.

1. Provide Application Security Training at All Levels

The first and most important step in ensuring web application security is to provide all software development personnel security training. It should not just be limited to app developers, but are related personnel involved in the process, such as Quality Assurance, Project Management, and operational staff. Training all disciplines associated with the development lifecycle helps to build a culture of security within the organization. Having trained personnel who understand the core security concepts associated with web application security lays the foundation for your security program.

2. Use Threat Modeling to Identify Threats and Vulnerabilities

One of the most important web application security best practices is to make threat models to identify threats. It allows you to look at all possible information assets that could be targeted and how they may be vulnerable and targeted by an attacker. This process is not done just once but repeated as changes are made to the application and the threat model should be constantly updated to capture new and emerging threats. The threat model will evolve over time and will mature as more people give it critical thought. This not only helps develop a good model but also serves to keep base security knowledge and concepts on the front mind of the entire team.

When creating a threat model, you must:

Identify all Information Assets

To prepare a threat model, you need to first identify all information assets (data) that may be targeted. You should hopefully already have identified sensitive data and categorized it with data classification levels. Within your application, you should know what data classification levels your application is working with, what that data is so that you can ensure that proper mechanisms are used to protect that data.

Identify and Define Possible Threats

Once you have identified critical data held within your application, you may start to consider the threats to this. This may be done in two manners, top-down or bottom-up. Bottom-up is more typically associated with how an actual attacker will work, they will probe the systems and find weaknesses and exploit and pivot until they get to the desired data. Top-down looks initially at the target and then looks to how someone may get access to it.

You may use either approach and sometimes it is helpful to use both to get different perspectives on the application’s threats.

Often times it is helpful to make use of some attack libraries (e.g., Mitre’s CAPEC) or vulnerability lists such as OWASP Top 10 to help seed the threat modeling effort.

Prioritize Vulnerabilities and Risks

Once you have developed and validated your threat model, you should assign priorities and risk values based on their impact and the probability of occurrence.

This may seem trivial but it is important. Every organization has limited resources and an efficient organization needs to wisely expend its resources to achieve the desired end state. Here, to reduce risk to the application, vulnerabilities, and threats must be based upon actual risk rather than what happens to pop up and is of interest this week.

3. Prepare a Web Application Security Architecture

Your development team will be focused on the rapid development and deployment of functionality. To make sure that this is secured, you have to develop a security architecture that makes it easy for them to develop and deploy secure code. This means that you have to have simple authentication and centralized authorization that ensures all requests (application, service requests, etc) are authorized vertically and horizontally without developers having to jump through hurdles to perform these critical security functions. You have to have your architecture use a data access framework that makes it impossible to open up a SQL injection vulnerability. You have to ensure that any untrusted data is being encoded prior to being sent to a browser. In short, ideally, your security architecture should make it trivial for your development team to develop code without opening any of the most common vulnerabilities such as found in the OWASP Top 10.

Your architecture should also plan for failure. Have mechanisms to alert on failure and limit the blast radius so that a single failure does not lead to catastrophic breaches. Multiple layered security controls help to enable this along with using numerous restricted least privilege accounts can help facilitate this.

Other web application security best practices that allow you to create a strong security architecture are:

-Keep a centralized structure where all authorization requests go through a central authority. -Ensure all security events are logged in a manner that they cannot be tampered with and that all security events are monitored to detect malicious behavior -Ensure all data is protected in accordance with appropriate standards for its classification levels (e.g., passwords, tokens, and other sensitive information are never transmitted or stored in clear text) -Use strong encryption algorithms such as AES and use strong key management controls (e.g, hardware security module or other appropriate key management tools)

4. Perform Regular Application Testing

Another effective web application security best practice is to regularly test your app for vulnerabilities throughout the development lifecycle.

Automated Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) and Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools should be used throughout the development lifecycle. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses but by combining their use, you get early issue identification that allows for rapid and cheaper fixes. By integrating these into your lifecycle, you get the additional benefit of maintaining a higher level of security awareness.

HOWEVER, be very careful to ensure that these tools do not flood your development teams with false positives. If they do, the tools will be routinely ignored. Ideally, you should have these tools integrate with your own issue tracking systems so that developers stay within their own normal workflow and security issues are identified and put in their normal work queue. Cypress Defense has extensive experience developing and integrating these tools into CI/CD pipelines for development teams so can assist with this if needed.

5. Use Real-Time Monitoring and Protection

As the old saying goes, “there are those that have been breached and know it and those that don’t know that they have been breached”. Organizations cannot depend upon preventative measures alone, but instead, need to have strong detection and response capabilities as well. The use of Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) along with detailed security logging integrated into robust SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) tools help you detect unusual activity that may require further attention. In many organizations, there is a disconnect between the operational side of the team and the development side, in which case, it may benefit your application to have your application be more attack aware (see below).

6. Develop Attack-Aware Applications

This web application security best practice takes your app security to the next level by providing immediate incident detection and response.

For this, you need to develop attack-aware apps that can detect intrusions or unusual activity immediately and either notify the security operations center (SOC) or take automated action. Many times developers are more knowledgeable of what standard behavior is and have more capabilities to detect malicious behavior. A standard user story for teams should be to detect malicious behavior.

The benefit of such apps is that intrusions or malicious actions are detected in real-time, which allows you to take immediate action. Apps can also be designed to take automated response actions like logging out the user and notifying the admin.

Similar to firewalls, this is an additional layer of security and is not meant to be the only security measure in place. This needs to be over and above an already securely-designed web application.

7. Run Applications with Few Privileges

Every web application provides some privileges to users on remote and local computers. As a web application security best practice, you should run apps on as few privileges as possible. As mentioned previously, it is preferred to plan on failure and use multiple least privilege accounts to limit the blast radius for when a failure does occur. Whenever privileged access is required, ensure that very strong authentication controls are established (e.g, multi-factor authentication only from internal network) and thorough auditing is in place.

Conclusion

Ensuring app security is a dynamic and ongoing process. Even after following all of the app security best practices above, you cannot afford to be complacent. You need to keep monitoring your app for security threats and improving your security measures.

The web application security best practices mentioned here provide a solid base for developing and running a secure web application. However, you still need to be vigilant and explore all other ways to secure your apps.

You can also use our dedicated security advisory services and tools to maintain app security on an ongoing basis.

C#/.NET/Core Training in Denver, CO – May 2019

Sun, 12 May 2019 15:04:10 GMT

If you’re tired of traveling all over the country, blowing your entire training budget on a single course, we have an opportunity for you! Cypress Data Defense is hosting a 2 day Secure Coding in C#/.NET course in Denver.

In this course, you’ll learn to secure your applications agains the most common OWASP Top 10/SANS CWE 25 vulnerabilities. We will follow the pattern of identifying and attacking the vulnerability, find and mitigate the vulnerability in code, and then attacking again to ensure the vulnerability no longer exists.

Unvalidated User Input
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
Injection (SQL, Command, LDAP)
Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards
Authentication and Session Management
Authorization
Insecure Cryptography (Hashing, Encryption)
Insecure Application Configuration
Insecure Object Reference
Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

Are Automated Scans Enough to Detect All Security Problems in an Application?

Wed, 28 Mar 2018 15:04:10 GMT

Automated Scanners Are Great Tools, But Are They Enough?

Spoiler alert: No, automated scanners alone cannot cover all aspects of a holistic application security plan. However, I suspect more details are in order, so I can’t end it here.

For this post, we’re really talking about two main types of automated scanners: Dynamic Analysis Scanning Testing (DAST) scanners and Static Analysis Scanning Testing (SAST) scanners. As implied in the name, DAST scanners run against an application that is running, whereas SAST scanners run against an application’s source code. We’re also going to take a look at the Payment Card Industry (PCI) scanner sub-category (generally, these are DAST scanners, but SAST scanners will typically have a PCI setting as well).

So why are there two types? In short, each has its own set of strengths and weaknesses. For example, a SAST scanner can find hard-coded passwords and unencoded outputs incredibly easily; it’s looking directly at the source code, after all. Since a DAST scanner works so differently, it has a harder time finding those glaring source code issues. However, it is a bit easier for a DAST scanner to check for other issues, such as authorization. It's not nearly as well as a human can, but it’s still better than most SAST scanners. DAST scanners have one other benefit, including the fact that they can check web server configuration. This involves checking for things like default web server pages, fingerprinting, or directory browsing. In other words, each scanner brings something to the table, and by taking advantage of the strengths of both, a reasonably thorough application assessment can be performed.

Cross-Site Request Forgery – All You Need to Know

Wed, 28 Mar 2018 15:03:10 GMT

Introduction to Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

The Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability category spent over 10 years in the OWASP Top 10 (until the 2017 release), yet a large percentage of the development community still doesn’t understand the risk. Our team conducts hundreds of security assessments per year, and the results still show a high percentage of applications that do not have CSRF protection.

Before we define CSRF, let’s address the first question our customers ask. If CSRF is no longer in the OWASP Top 10, do I need to worry about it? Basic threat modeling can help answer the question. Start with this question: Do any of my web applications use cookie-based authentication? If the answer is no, then see your way out here. Unfortunately for most of us, our legacy and model-view-controller (MVC) applications use cookie-based authentication. If you fall into this group, then you have to address CSRF. The main reason CSRF was removed from the OWASP Top 10 is that modern frameworks, such as Spring Boot, .NET MVC / Core, and NodeJS, provide built-in protection to prevent CSRF attacks. But do you know if the CSRF feature is actually enabled and properly configured for all endpoints? Most security teams do not know the answer to this question, which is why you still need to worry about CSRF. Misconfiguration errors in these frameworks now lead to most of the CSRF vulnerabilities identified in our assessments.