Ways To Improve Application Security

A web application is a part of an organization that can come under many threats. Therefore, it’s vital for companies to always be striving for ways to keep their web applications secure.

There are several great approaches to keeping your applications secure so that your sensitive data doesn’t get stolen and misused. Our post covers some great methods that you can start implementing to secure your web applications.

Regular Backups

First of all, it’s important for organizations to regularly backup their websites. This is to make sure that you always have an up-to-date version of your website that can be restored and used in the case of hackers breaching your live website.

It’s common for web host providers to create backups of your web applications within their servers too. This can give you peace of mind in knowing that you have regularly updated versions of your website stored away safely.

Without having proper backups, getting your applications to go live again after being restored can be a more grueling task. So, be sure to frequently update website backups.

Professional Hackers

When organizations carry out procedures to determine how strong their applications are, they can often miss certain elements. One of the ways to catch these more obscure methods of exploiting applications is to hire professional hackers.

Professional hackers can be hired by companies to carry out attacks on applications and provide you with details on how exactly they achieved gaining access to your system. This can be incredibly valuable as it allows developers and security teams to work on fixing vulnerabilities that they themselves may have missed.

When it comes to carrying out deliberate attacks, be sure that they’re conducted in an isolated setting. Some of the methods that professional hackers use to test your application security include cross-site scripting, SQL injections, and infiltrating unsecured authentication measures.

Security Scans

Security scans should be carried out regularly in order for companies to stay on top of threats and prevent them from causing harm. It’s common practice for organizations to carry out scans once every week.

In addition to this, you should perform scans whenever changes are made to an application. This ensures that the changes you made haven’t decreased the security within the application. If adjustments have caused vulnerabilities to show up, you can fix them quickly and efficiently.  

You should also be aware that security scanners can still miss threats, especially if attacks are being sent through malware. Therefore, security teams and developers must be ready to tackle threats within applications effectively, even if security scans haven’t shown any vulnerabilities.

Prioritizing Security

If developers are treating security as something that comes after development, they’ll come under more pressure dealing with security issues at a later date. That’s why it’s important for developers to implement security protocols from the very beginning of a development cycle.

Security must be integral to the entire development process. If not, security flaws could enter the system at an early stage and cause massive issues later on. Developers then have to trace their steps backward and remediate any issues if they’re fixable.

So, be sure that your developers understand how important security is for keeping applications secure at all development stages. It can save you a lot of time, money, and hassle.

Password Policies

Using password management tools is a super easy and effective way to ensure that users are using strong passwords. Creating strong passwords includes using numbers, letters, and special characters which can be difficult to memorize.

These types of passwords are much stronger compared to easily memorable ones which add protection to user accounts. Password management tools enable you to save complex passwords in a system that you can access at any time. This is helpful for organizations that have several areas that require passwords.  

These programs can also let you generate random keywords. This increases security even further as the passwords are completely random and unique.

In addition to this, two-factor authentication should be put in place. This involves giving users multiple steps that they must complete before being able to log in. It’s an effective way to make sure that users are who they say they are before granting them access to a system.

This makes it more difficult for cybercriminals to hack into your system through your user accounts. It’s unlikely that they’ll be able to pass the two-factor authentication stages and they’ll be denied entry.

Picking a Secure Host

Selecting a secure host is a simple but important aspect to consider. If the host that your web applications are running on is weak, you’re going to run into more security problems.

Therefore, you should find hosts that have security measures in place to reduce the chances of attacks. You can also check reviews on the host to see what users have said regarding the security measures that they have in place.

Organizations should find out how often the host updates their site too. A host that doesn’t frequently carry out updates is more prone to coming under attack from cybercriminals. A vulnerable host provides attackers with easier access to your web applications. So, be picky and select a secure host.

Regular Updates

Just as it’s important for web hosts to carry out updates, it’s just as important for your developers to regularly update software. If the software is out of date, it’s in a bad position to deal with new incoming threats.

Hackers are continuously running scans to find weaknesses in software to exploit and out of date software is an easy target.

Make sure to regularly update software as soon as updates are available. Leaving applications out of date for too long can highlight more weaknesses within your system that hackers can exploit.

Conclusion

After reading through our post about the 7 best ways to improve application security, we hope that you feel more assured about protecting your apps.

Hackers are always discovering new methods to exploit software which means that organizations have to stay one step ahead and make gaining access as difficult as possible. The techniques mentioned in this post are effective ways to keep hackers out of your applications and ensure that they can continue running smoothly.