Posted by: Praveen Joshi
March 10, 2023
A website bears the flag of your business on the internet. It is there online for the purpose of increasing the market reach of your business. But the internet is full of threats like hacking attempts, port scans, traffic sniffers, and data miners. Security protocols are necessary to keep all these threats at bay. Web applications are not only the face of your business online. They also host a huge amount of your critical data. Leaving your web applications unsecured exposes your infrastructure and data to a wide range of malicious activities online. Hacks or breaches on these applications might end up with catastrophic consequences for your business. This why it is important to be in line with advanced cybersecurity measures to ensure that your web applications are well protected from prevailing threats.
of web application penetration testing reports reveal at least one vulnerability within the website, 20 being the average per website.
of all websites are having vulnerabilities of high-risk level (Urgent and Critical).
of web applications contain information leakage vulnerabilities, making it the most widespread web security issue.
of malware is distributed through web applications.
Technology is moving ahead at a rapid pace. This market competition is also growing tougher every day. Development teams are trying to meet a critical deadline 54% of the time while developing an application. Most often this leads to sending vulnerable codes to production. Eventually, these codes result in web applications with security issues.
To protect your web applications from getting victimized by cyber incidents, you need to tick every item from the following checklist:
Yes, it is necessary to get that lock on the address bar. Using an SSL connection certainly assures security. But to make full use of it, you need to SSL sitewide. It is not something that can deploy page-to-page depending on your choice. Any information that is in transition outside SSL is in plain text. Anyone can intercept and decipher this information. If any piece of critical data, such as passwords or authentication details fall in the wrong hands. It can compromise your whole website. Therefore, you must ensure the availability of a verified SSL certificate for all the pages on your web application.
Creating strong passwords is a necessary practice to boost your web application security. Weak passwords allow hackers to get their hands easily on your website. Put your best efforts into creating unique usernames and passwords for all your accounts. A good password must include uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters as well. Moreover, you should update these passwords at regular intervals. People often find it difficult to do this regularly. They can use a password manager to make it simpler.
The encryption protocols have been through a drastic change in recent years. SHA1 encryption standards used earlier are no longer secure enough to guard your data against modern-day threats. The new SHA256 standards have taken command of improving encryption technologies. You must verify the certificate of your website to make sure that it is using the SHA256 encryption standards. If not, then try to upgrade it as soon as you can. The standards of encryption will keep on improving as long as there are ways left to crack them.
Every time a new update for your software is released, install it instantly. The longer you are using the older version of the underlying software, the more susceptible you are to attacks. The updates are like security patches that fix security gaps in the previous software versions.
Even the best of security measures do not guarantee 100% protection from hacks or breaches. There are still chances that your web application is breached. In such instances, backups allow you to restore your website. It minimalizes the damage and you do not need to start from scratch again.
So, these are the five best practices you need to add to your web application security checklist.
