How to secure web and mobile applications
Security online is crucial, and we all can imagine why. Hacks and breaches could have a huge negative impact on companies:
- Loss of customer trust;
- Financial losses;
- Leaked user data;
- Legal issues.
You don’t really have a lot of information when you google on how to secure your website or application. Most of the articles suggests using backups, strong passwords and make sure you use https protocol.
But backups do not secure anything, it simply helps you recover your data. Also using https just encrypts the communication, but it doesn’t really secure the website. The only useful tip is using strong passwords. Most hackers might only try using some default credentials and do not waste time guessing your password. Instead, they are going to rely on vulnerabilities, exploit them and gain access to your application.
If you have a vulnerable web application, you will be easily HACKED. Hackers use these weaknesses to gain access to your application.
So, how can you actually secure your applications and websites?
First of all, achieving 100% security is impossible. We can only improve our security of our applications and make sure they are as secure as possible, so the time will not be worth it for a hacker to get into our system.
The following approaches will help you improve the security of your applications regardless of what kind of applications they are.
- Source code review
The first thing that you should do is make sure you are writing secure code. This way, your application is built from the ground up to be secure and to not introduce any bugs or vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers to gain access. It is easy to say, but after you write the application, the developer has to think the way a hacker does and try to secure the source code. It is a really good idea to get that code reviewed by other developers or a security team.
This is really good because you actually review every single line and make sure that nothing is vulnerable or will allow hackers to exploit your application and gain access.
2. Get a Pentest done
A penetration test involves hiring a team of ethical hackers to try and hack your application. These ethical hackers will approach your application the same way the black hat hackers do. They are going to try to gather as much information as possible, discover all the weaknesses and vulnerabilities and see if they can exploit them to gain access. At the end of the process, they are going to give you a detailed report of every finding so you can pass it to your developers and patch any vulnerabilities they discover. The main advantage of this method is you could test attack surfaces that you cannot test with other methods. Such as your servers that are running your web application and the weakest link which is the employees so these ethical hackers can even use social engineering and chain it with other simple attacks or vulnerabilities that they might find on your system to see if you can gain access.
Cyber Threat Defense can help you improve the security of your application, because we offer the whole bundle of security services. From source code review, penetration testing, external, internal network security and everything you need in order to secure your product or company as much as possible.
