Application Security: The Key to Digital Transformation and Long-term Enterprise Growth

Many modern organizations aim for digitization-led growth by adopting a wide range of software applications. Unfortunately, companies expanding their application ecosystem also have a downside. Many enterprise applications present serious security risks that make them vulnerable to cyberattacks and data breaches.

To reduce these risks, organizations must prioritize application security. To do this, they must incorporate automated security solutions for pentesting and attack surface management (ASM) into their security programs – and if they are at high risk of breaches, they must also leverage red teaming services to conduct post-breach exercises on insecure applications.
The right solutions from a reliable partner like BreachLock empower businesses to identify and address the exploitable vulnerabilities in their attack surface, thus lowering the risk of attacks and protecting business-critical applications from harm. Over time, these solutions can also empower them to capture the maximum value from their application ecosystem and achieve digital transformation at scale.

Why Organizations Need Robust Application Security

The 2020 supply chain attack on SolarWinds’ Orion IT monitoring and management software is one of the most well-known cases of a cyberattack targeting a software application. By cleverly inserting malicious code into Orion’s source code, the hackers were able to launch a massive attack against hundreds of SolarWinds’ customers worldwide. Other attacks on applications, such as the ones targeting Equifax, Kaseya, Atlassian, and Apple also caused widespread damage to companies and governments all over the world.

Why applications make organizations vulnerable to attack

One reason, according to a site reliability engineer quoted in the 2023 GitLab Global DevSecOps Report Series, is that “there’s too much focus on pushing out new features without taking the time to keep an eye on security, code quality, and code rot”. Per another respondent, the risk of attacks is high because “there are an overwhelming amount of vulnerabilities to triage and resolve.” Another problem is that security is often considered just an “afterthought” in the application delivery chain, according to 50% of IT professionals in another survey.

All these facts show that software is a vulnerable business asset. And as more and more of these assets spread across the business ecosystem, they also expand organizations’ attack surfaces.

Lessons to be learned from the recent cyberattacks on applications

The attacks on SolarWinds, Kaseya, etc show that even a single attack can significantly damage an organization’s operations, reputation, and productivity. It can also hamper its customer relationships and curtail its competitiveness and growth. Worse, the disruptions could last 12 to 24 months according to most security leaders.

Organizations can learn several lessons from these attacks:

• Lesson #1: Any application can be the target of a cyberattack so it’s vital to proactively manage the risks to all the applications that constitute the organization’s attack surface.
• Lesson # 2: A multi-layered security ecosystem is vital to protect enterprise applications and manage the attack surface.
• Lesson #3: Proactive continuous security testing is vital for all organizations, but particularly for those aiming for software-led digital transformation.

The Impact of Digital Transformation on Application Security Strategies

An increasing number of modern companies are embracing digital transformation with gusto. They are integrating cutting-edge digital tools and technologies to optimize operations, gain a competitive advantage, and deliver higher value to stakeholders.
In business’ digital transformation journeys, software plays – and will play – a critical role. Applications are already used in many parts of modern enterprise ecosystems: sales, marketing, operations, HR, financial management, supply chain management, and much more. As more applications are created in the coming years – 750 million by 2025 according to some experts in a study by IDC – more will also be adopted to enable digital transformation. But doing so will also expand organizations’ attack surfaces and make them more vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Per Cisco’s Cybersecurity Readiness Index, 78% of IT professionals feel that their firms are already vulnerable to multi-staged attacks that could affect their entire application stack over the next 12 months.

The Need for Integrating Security into DevOps Practices

DevOps is a cross-functional approach that seamlessly combines Dev and Ops to improve collaboration among them. It encourages iterative and continuous development and testing, and helps create a culture of accountability, transparency, and shared responsibility. All of this helps accelerate application development and delivery and improves application quality.

That said, the faster pace and higher frequency of application releases often come at a cost: security vulnerabilities that emerge during development and remain in the application post-release. To minimize these vulnerabilities and maintain application security, it’s essential to “shift left” in the application lifecycle. This means incorporating security practices earlier in and throughout the SDLC – a practice known as DevSecOps.

The Business Impact of DevSecOps and Robust Application Security Practices

DevSecOps is DevOps strengthened with a security-focused mindset. With this approach, security practices are incorporated into the SDLC from the beginning and at every stage, allowing organizations to identify and remediate vulnerabilities faster and earlier, reduce their security risks, and create more secure applications.

DevSecOps for Collaborative and Uncompromising Application Security

In DevSecOps, development teams collaborate closely with security and operations teams at every stage of the SDLC. Together, they plan and develop a secure application design. Developers are aware of their security responsibilities and are trained in secure coding practices that enable them to develop applications that are “secure by design”.

It’s easy to prioritize continuous security in DevSecOps because teams can leverage automated DevOps pen testing tools to test the code regularly. Automated tools can augment the efforts of human testers, allowing them to find, prioritize, and fix vulnerabilities before deploying the code to production, resulting in an application that’s inherently secure and resilient to cyber threats.
These solutions empower organizations to utilize pentesting to assess the security of an application or software product at various stages of its development lifecycle, such as:

• Design: Identify potential threats and attack vectors based on the application’s architecture and design
• Development: Analyze the source code for security vulnerabilities using automated tools or manual testing using code review for any security issues automation might miss
• Testing: Testing the running application for security vulnerabilities using input validation testing with malicious inputs to identify vulnerabilities
• Deployment: Prior to application deployment pentesting ensures that the environment is secure and ready for production including, configuration review and network security testing for common vulnerabilities
• Maintenance: After deployment, pentesting is crucial to catch vulnerabilities introduced by updates or changes

Secure Your Applications and Protect Your Organization with the BreachLock PTaaS Deployment Model

BreachLock offers human-delivered, AI-powered, and automated pentesting solutions to accelerate prioritization and remediation of your pentesting results to drive more effective outcomes. The BreachLock Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) Model offers pentesting solutions to maximize the flexibility and versatility to choose the solution and methodology that works best for you.

To learn more about BreachLock’s security offerings and how they can help protect your organization, schedule a free discovery call.

About BreachLock

BreachLock is a global leader in PTaaS, Attack Surface Management, and Automated Pentesting and Red Teaming. BreachLock offers human-delivered, AI-powered solutions in one integrated platform based on a standardized built-in framework that enables consistent and regular benchmarks of attack tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to deliver enhanced predictability, consistency, and accurate results in real-time, every time.

Author

Ann Chesbrough