Why Application Security should be your top priority and what you can do about it?

Web or mobile applications are ruling our lives. From paying utility bills, playing games, and browsing on social media to booking movie and airline tickets and receiving news-feeds, applications are here to stay. According to statistics, the annual downloads of applications in the year 2020 is likely to touch 258 billion (Source: app-scoop.com). What does this imply? Our lives are going to be increasingly driven by digital applications. These bring in their wake attributes like convenience, ease of navigation, speedy delivery, and security, among others. However, the last one, ‘security’, has turned out to be a challenge of sorts with cyber threats growing incessantly.

Today, cyber threats have assumed menacing proportions with alarming consequences — for individuals, enterprises, and governments alike. These have evolved with advanced technologies and the propensity of users to remain indifferent. Cyber threats are just lurking behind the IT infrastructure waiting to exploit the built-in vulnerabilities. So, how does one remain vigilant and preempt such an eventuality? The answer lies in conducting a robust and time-bound application security testing. It ensures the timely detection of any vulnerability, breach, or risk, thereby allowing the organization to mitigate it.

Planning and running an application security testing exercise can have challenges (and vulnerabilities) such as:

How to build a robust application security testing methodology

# Analyze the software development process: Many-a-times the processes drawn for building software can have gaps or weak links. These can bring a smile on the faces of hackers. Thus, testers should scrutinize or analyze the development cycle to identify the gaps or vulnerabilities.

# Create a threat model: Post analyzing the development process, prepare a threat model to understand the data flow through the application. This way, testers can identify the problem areas or defective locations in the process.

# Automate: The testing of applications comprises steps that are iterative in nature. These mundane tasks can tie human resources, which otherwise could have been used to execute other critical tasks. So, to improve efficiency and better identification of glitches, the testing process should be automated. By running automated test scripts, testers and developers can examine the source code to identify vulnerabilities. Thereafter, the same can be mitigated before actual deployment.

# Manual testing not to be dispensed with: Even though manual testing receives a lot of flak when it comes to the identification of errors, they can be effective as well. This is due to the fact that automated tools working on a script can miss certain errors that are not accounted for in the script. This is where manual testing can help by leveraging human expertise.

# Fixing metrics: The vulnerabilities in an application can only be ascertained when the features and functionalities are tested against a set of metrics. These help enterprises to focus on specific areas and improve risk management.

Conclusion

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