Applications often handle sensitive user data and perform critical functions, making them prime targets for cyberattacks. There's no app or system too small for cyberthieves and hackers, so it's a big mistake for any company to think that their app will be safe without robust security.
Apps that lack adequate protection are vulnerable to numerous threats, including data theft, unauthorized access, malware injection, and denial-of-service attacks. A breach of in-app security can lead to severe consequences, such as financial losses, damage to reputation, legal liabilities, and loss of user trust. At worst, a breach could harm your brand so severely that it could bring down your company.
In this challenging landscape, app development teams are seeking the best combination of application security tools and practices to protect their apps from unauthorized access, data breaches, and other malicious activities. While each startup needs to find the approaches that work best for their needs, these are the most popular tactics for maintaining app security.
MAST for Smartphone Apps
MAST (Mobile Application Security Testing) tools are a crucial part of any app security toolkit. They enable dev and security teams to carry out comprehensive testing for a range of security vulnerabilities on both iOS and Android, as well as mobile-specific issues like jailbreaking and data leakage.
MAST functionalities include static and dynamic analysis, binary code testing, and vulnerability assessments to check the app's codebase, architecture, and configurations. By utilizing MAST tools, developers and security professionals can proactively harden the app's security posture to safeguard user data, privacy, and integrity from malicious exploits and cyberattacks.
Third-Party Risk Management
Third parties represent the biggest threats to any app, program, or organization, for that matter. It's critical to manage the risks proactively by conducting due diligence assessments for all third-party vendors, suppliers, and service providers. Assessments should include reviewing security practices and certifications to ensure that they meet your security standards.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools are relevant here since they can enable startups to create an inventory of third-party components used in their apps and spot any security vulnerabilities affecting these components.
Firewalls for Browser-Based Interfaces
A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a vital defense layer that protects applications from attacks such as XSS, SQL injection, and file inclusion. It's crucial for app security, going a long way to mitigate the risks of application-layer attacks and safeguard sensitive data from exploitation and compromise.
Like any firewall, a WAF operates between the app and the open web to monitor, filter, and block malicious traffic and attempted attacks. It inspects all traffic, both HTTP and HTTPS, to analyze incoming requests and responses for suspicious patterns, anomalies, or known attack signatures.
Layers of Data Storage Security
Apps can collect an enormous amount of potentially sensitive user data, such as passwords, financial and payment details, and personal information. This data needs to be protected and secured from unauthorized access, tampering, or theft, which requires secure data storage and transmission techniques.
Most startups use a combination of access controls and permissions, together with encryption techniques like Transport Layer Security (TLS) for data in transit and AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) for data at rest. Of course, it's just as important to manage cryptographic keys carefully to make sure that no unauthorized individual gets access to them.
Vulnerability Management
Startups need vulnerability management to proactively detect risks and mitigate them before they can be exploited by malicious actors. This involves employing a combination of tactics, including vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, and patch management, to identify and remediate weaknesses as quickly as possible.
Vulnerability management also involves prioritizing emerging risks and threats according to their severity so that security teams can focus on the ones that could cause the most harm and avoid the risk of a serious data breach. With effective vulnerability management, app teams can enhance the overall resilience and security posture of their applications, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive data and resources.
More Than Passwords
It's important to build multi-factor authentication, or MFA, into every app to raise security levels. MFA requires users to provide more than one form of verification before they can access the app, typically a combination of a password and a security token, code sent to their mobile or email, or biometric data.
MFA significantly lowers the risks of unauthorized access, credential theft, and identity-related attacks. By ensuring that only verified users can log into the app, MFA reduces the likelihood of successful brute-force attacks and phishing attempts, which could expose sensitive data or allow access to app controls.
Incident Monitoring and Response
App security is a process that never ends, so ongoing incident monitoring and response is essential. With proactive, effective monitoring and resolution procedures, you can detect and contain security threats in a shorter period of time. This minimizes the impact of any breaches, data loss, and service disruptions and often helps prevent them entirely.
Efficient incident monitoring and response involves setting up alerts for potential security breaches, together with real-time surveillance over system logs, network traffic analysis, and intrusion detection. It requires constantly scanning for suspicious activities and unauthorized access attempts and defining protocols for an immediate and coordinated response to mitigate and remediate any identified threats.
Find the Right Mix of App Security Techniques and Tools
Investing in robust app security measures is essential to safeguard user data, maintain system integrity, and ensure the overall trustworthiness and reliability of applications in today's digital landscape. The right combination of effective app security tactics and tools will help bolster your app's reputation, attract and retain more users, and ultimately pave the way for increased revenue.
