Web Application Security Standards

Protecting software with web application security standards

Web applications are now the #1 target in confirmed security breaches, so development teams must adhere to web application security standards to protect their organizations from attack.

IBM estimates that a breach costs organizations nearly 5 million dollars. However, most organizations continue to struggle with applications and API security because data is stored across multiple public clouds, private servers, and hybrid environments. Also, as software teams continue to increase code velocity by adopting AI into the SDLC, it is becoming more challenging to review codebases for security flaws. As a result, 71% of organizations suffer a tech debt of flaws that have not been remediated for over a year.

In this context, the onus of application security is shifting to developers. Instead of merely writing code, developers must now write ‘secure’ code.

Applying the Open Web Application Security Project’s (OWASP) Top 10 list of the most critical security flaws into your organization’s coding guidelines is a good start. Software teams that check for these most oft-exploited flaws are less likely to incur a security breach.

The OWASP Top 10 – 2021 includes:

1. Broken Access Control
2. Cryptographic Failures
3. Injection
4. Insecure Design
5. Security Misconfiguration
6. Vulnerable and Outdated Components
7. Identification and Authentication Failures
8. Software and Data Integrity Failures
9. Security Logging and Monitoring Failures
10. Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)

Even as security breaches dominate the headlines, many applications today continue to be released with OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities. The key to eliminating these flaws is to integrate web application security standards into the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC), instead of relying on one-time scans or ad-hoc penetration tests after software code has been written.

For organizations seeking to improve compliance with web application security standards, Veracode offers an application security platform with comprehensive application security tools for automated and manual testing.

Conforming to web application security standards with Veracode

Veracode is a leading provider of application security services and solutions that help protect the software driving business today. Its platform provides comprehensive code review tools for developers to assess and improve application security from design through production, enabling their organizations to build, buy, and assemble applications with confidence.

Veracode solutions for meeting web application security standards

To help development teams meet web application security standards, Veracode provides a broad range of web application testing solutions:

• Veracode Dynamic Analysis  is a unified solution that lets developers find, secure and monitor all web applications, including those that organizations are unaware of or have forgotten about. It also helps software teams run periodic DAST on hundreds of assets and code libraries. It automatically scans for fingerprint checks, SSL, injection attacks, XSS scripting, and other threats.
• Veracode Static Analysis helps development teams adhere to web application security standards by quickly identifying and remediating application security flaws. Veracode’s patented web application security testing tools can analyze popular frameworks and languages without requiring source code, enabling developers to quickly assess code that is either written, bought or downloaded. As a result, software teams can spend less time on manual code review meetings and instead automatically using this tool to identify and categorize flaws by severity, thus helping developers to prioritize the flaws that need urgent fixing.
• Veracode Software Composition Analysis provides tools for building an inventory of third-party components to identify vulnerabilities in open source and commercial code. It enables software teams to catch and fix vulnerabilities in real-time, right from their preferred integrated development environment (IDE). As a result, the tool prevents unintentional flaws from getting into your codebase.
• Veracode Fix leverages AI to augment the capabilities of software teams in fixing flaws. Overburdened security teams constantly find threats and fix patches. As a result, 71% of organizations suffer tech debt from flaws that have not been remediated for over a year. Veracode Fix solves this problem by studying your team’s previous patches as a reference and automatically generating new patch recommendations.

Learn more about meeting web application security standards with Veracode, and about Veracode’s XSS cheat sheet and solutions for detecting SQL injection in Java.