Cyber attacks are going to be one of the biggest challenges that business and individuals will face in a more interconnected world. More precisely stated, while the exponential rise of digital platforms, apps, and software spearheads it, the danger of cyber attacks grows with it. They continue to evolve the way they carry out their attacks as they look for new open spots in the software and applications where they can steal sensitive information or disrupt services and incur financial losses.
Topping the priority list are software securing and apps for developers, business owners, and even an average user. Here comes the step-by-step guide to the blog post on how to secure your software and apps with best cybersecurity practices, making sure your developed application can resist malicious attacks.
Why Cyber Security Matters for Software and Apps
Cyber attacks can trigger very harmful implications both financially and in reputation. Depending on the nature of breach, there is a potential loss of personal and sensitive information which cuts across customer data, financial records, and proprietary business information. This could be interpreted to mean legal suits as well as regulatory fines besides melting customer trust.
Apart from that, some downtimes cause losses in terms of lost productivity, loss of service, and resultant revenue losses. For business whose day-to-day activities depend on the functionalities of the specific software or application, cybersecurity should be part and parcel of the development and maintenance process.
1. Deploy strong authentication mechanisms:
One of the very first security measures to your software and applications is the assurance that access can only be through the highly secured authentication mechanism. Weak authentication basically gives ample opportunity for malicious access and even data breaches.
Best Practice on Authentication:
- Implementing Multi-Factor Based Authentication: This type of authentication requires the users to bypass two security factors, one is by entering their password, and other other is by entering the one-time verification code as sent to their provided email address or as an SMS to their mobile phone.
- Complexity Requirements: Password complexity requirements are invoked, and the combination of both letters, numbers, and special characters should be there in it.
- Hashing: Passwords have to hash securely. Hash algorithms like bcrypt or Argon2 are high-strength. Never store password in plain.
- Session Management: Proper controls for session management should exist, which actively cleans up sessions when a user logs off or has been inactive for some pre-defined time.
Importance of MFA
Multi-factor authentication would go a long way in minimizing chances of brute-forcing attacks, credential stuffing as well as phishing attacks. When authentications are multiple, you put more authentication factor layers that are hard for hackers to bypass.
2. Always Update Your Software and Apps
Majority of the attackers get into your software and apps via known vulnerabilities in your old software. This includes patches and updates to keep your software current and secure.
Best Practices Keep Current Versions of Software
Always be sure that any installed operating systems, libraries, or dependencies are up to date. Much of the time security vulnerabilities are found in third-party libraries-so it is worth taking the time to be up to date with current versions.
- Automate updates: Install all the available security updates and patches immediately they are available. These should be as automated as possible to reduce time spent when your software is exposed to risks.
- Expected emerging new vulnerabilities: Subscribe to a database such as National Vulnerability Database or CVE list, therefore letting you know of newly identified threats.
The major cause behind experiencing breaches in leading brands or firms is due to software failure. Such situations has happened before, and during the year 2017, hackers had access to personal data of more than 140 million people through their breach done at Equifax. Timely updating the software is one among the possible and easiest way to prevent such attacks.
3. Protection of Your APIs
If your application or software makes use of APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, then securing those endpoints becomes the need of the hour, as attackers will target the API to get unmitigated access directly into backend systems and data in an application.
Best Practices for Protecting Your APIs:
- Use HTTPS: Encrypt all API traffic using HTTPS so that even if the data involved with the transmission of API requests is sensitive, it will not be intercepted in transit.
- API Authentication and Authorization: Use OAuth 2.0 or JSON Web Tokens (JWT) so that API requests are made only by those authorized users to specific end-points.
- Implement rate limiting: Permit filtering of your APIs from denial-of-service attacks by filtering the requests based upon a certain limit of requests within a specific time frame, whether per IP address or per user.
- Input validation: Validate inputs to APIs so malicious data would not inject into your system. SQL injection or XSS attacks usually take place if inputs are not properly validated.
Why API Security is Important?
From the outside, the applications like to and need a communication bridge to other services, which is called APIs. That means that an unsecured API can easily be compromised to expose your whole system. So, therefore, the appropriate kind of authentication encryption and validation let you protect your API endpoints from unauthorized accesses, breaches of data.
4. Security Testing
Security testing also falls under the SDLC. There are different types of testing, which, by pointing out vulnerabilities, ensure that they do not offer opportunities for the same to be exploited by the bad guys.
Security Testing Best Practices:
- Penetration Testing: Penetration testing is where security experts test your application in order to find vulnerabilities that the bad guys might use, just as they would in a real attack scenario.
- Static and Dynamic Code Analysis: Conduct SAST and DAST during the code analysis through tools that might detect the vulnerability at the design time as well as runtime.
- Vulnerability Scanning: Auto-scans your app for vulnerabilities and tracks it against known security vulnerabilities.
Introduce a bug bounty for ethical hackers to find the vulnerabilities in your app. This can be provided through popular platforms like HackerOne or Bugcrowd.
Why Testing is Important:
Without which all the inbuilt weaknesses in the software cannot come to light security testing cannot be conducted. All the vulnerabilities caught before they turn out to be a security incident that might open up an opportunity for your organization to be compromised of data and money or for regular security testing.
5. Secure Coding Practices
One of the keys to proper cybersecurity ownership is appropriate developers. The adoption of secure coding practice can prevent SQL injections, cross-site scripting, and buffer overflows.
Best Practices for Secure Coding:
- Input Validation and Sanitization: Users’ inputs should always be validated and sanitized to avoid injection attacks.
- Use Prepared Statements: If you interact with the database, make use of prepared statements that will protect you from SQL injection attacks.
- Avoid embedding of secrets like API keys, credentials or passwords into code. Instead make use of environment variables or vaults to manage secrets
- Use Least Privilege: You should limit access and provide privilege. Meaning every piece of the software only requests permissions to do something specific
Why Secure Coding?
Huge threats exploit vulnerabilities that arise due to bad coding practices. When you practice secure coding practices, you surely drop your attack surface down and even the attackers will not be easy to breach your system.
6. Data Encryption
Data security is the largest problem when using any type of application or software, and encryption is meant to protect sensitive data or information from access by an individual, like user data, payment information, or even proprietary business data for an organization.
Encryption Best Practices:
Ensure that the data is encrypted both when it is at rest and in transit: Implementation of AES, as well as other encryption algorithms, including the encryption of files held in a file, database, or even in cloud storage is expected. It should be secure when in transit through proper protocols applied. For example, transport layer security.
- End-to-End Encryption (E2EE): Any messenger application or file-sharing application should support E2EE, which means only the sender and the receiver can decrypt.
- Secure Encryption Keys: Hardware-based or cloud-based key management services should require secure encryption keys, meaning it cannot be accessed by anyone other than the intended parties.
Why Encryption is so Important:
Encryption simply means that even in case hackers manage to infiltrate your system with your information, without the keys, you cannot read the data encrypted. This is one of the most basic layers of protection against cybercriminals for your sensitive information.
7. Monitoring and Logging Activities
Last but not least, it is extremely important to continuously monitor your software and applications for malicious activity. Logging activities and alerts on suspicious behavior enables you to detect and respond to security incidents almost in real time.
Best Practices in Monitoring:
- Implement Real-Time Monitoring: Use SIEM tools to monitor and analyze logs in real-time for suspicious activities.
- Activate Anomaly Alerts: Allow alerting on occurrences like successful login attempts, illegal access of sensitive data or high data transmissions.
- Log Maintenance: All of the following activities that is, system login, access, and modification have to be logged. These logs may become too precious to be used at the time tracing security incidents.
Why Monitoring Matters:
Cyber attacks go unnoticed for weeks or months; that’s long enough hackers have time to ravage resources of gigantic proportions. Real-time monitoring lets you seize and curb threats before they grow into full-scale attacks.
Conclusion
Software and application locking is a continuous process that needs one to be ever vigilant and proactive. Whether it is just a simple mobile application or a software tool – a very comprehensive one, it will include the use of robust authentication and maintaining an updated version of your software.
But do not forget to harden the APIs, perform regular security vulnerability tests, and encrypt your data. This will include discussing cyber security, which forms part of mutual responsibilities but keeping up with the latest in threats and vulnerabilities will ensure your software continues to be secure in an ever-changing cyber environment.