4 Best Practices For Securing Web Applications: Preventing Threats

Web apps are now an essential part of both business and daily life. The security of these web applications is very concerning as a result of their rising popularity. However, while creating a web application, developers frequently neglect to adequately consider the dangers to security.

50 percent of internal web application vulnerabilities are deemed to pose a high or critical risk, according to the Edgescan Vulnerability Statistics report for 2021. Additionally, it found that 32% of internet-facing application vulnerabilities carry a high or critical risk.

Because of this, developers always work to make their systems as secure as possible. In this article, we’ll recommend practises for countering threats. However, let’s first comprehend.

What is Web Application Security?

Web application security, or Web AppSec, is the use of tools, tactics, and best practices to shield web applications from attack. In the event of breaches, it also includes the avoidance of data loss and the loss of important information.

Unfortunately, the complexity of web app source code often makes it simpler for flaws to go unnoticed. Additionally, it’s just a matter of time before threat actors identify and exploit such vulnerabilities given the increasing number and penetration of assaults on online apps.

Now, let’s get into the

Best practices to stop threats

  • Data encryption

Similar data is transformed into encrypted data that can only be decrypted or decoded by the user or recipient with the help of a security key. For data security, encryption of both static and transit data is essential. The first step in basic encryption is to get an SSL certificate, which secures your website. If you haven’t already, you should think about switching your website over to HTTPS right away.

Don’t store important user information like user IDs, passwords, and financial information in plain text in addition to encrypting your website. Instead, you can safeguard these details by using a password storage app.

  • Use a web application firewall

Web apps are protected against application-layer threats by the web application firewall (WAF). It provides a strong defense against the most serious web application flaws, including broken authentication, cross-site scripting, injection attacks, and cross-site forgery, among others.

You can think of WAF as a barrier separating the client and the web application. It continuously monitors and examines HTTP traffic entering and leaving web applications. When the flow of traffic is deemed safe, WAF permits it to do so. However, in order to stop threats and attacks, harmful traffic is prohibited from online apps.

A collection of rules, also known as policies, are used by the web application firewall to discriminate between legitimate and malicious traffic. These policies can be modified to match the particular needs of your web application because they are adaptable.

Web app firewalls can be set up in a variety of ways. There are two main categories of WAFs

    • WAFs based on hardware
    • Cloud-based WAFs

Both have their benefits and drawbacks. Therefore, selecting the best alternative for yourself requires knowing your own business requirements and acting accordingly.

  • Automate and integrate security tools

Despite the rapid expansion of cybersecurity risks, we are fortunately now able to secure our web applications thanks to a variety of automation tools and solutions. We no longer have to rely only on manual penetration testing, manual scanning, and the like, even though manual tests still have their advantages.

Additionally, contemporary cybersecurity solutions are built to integrate with one another. High-end automated vulnerability scanners, for instance, can frequently be integrated with various issue tracker’s CI/CD platforms.

An advanced bot detection solution, like Data Dome, for instance, may interface with your server log, SIEM/SOC tools, and any program that reads HTTP request headers in addition to automatically detecting and blocking dangerous bot activity.

  • Injection and input validation

Malicious code is introduced into browsers or other entry forms in this class of attack methods. SQL injection and cross-site scripting are two examples of injection, which refer to harmful SQL code and malicious scripts in website frontends, respectively. Input validation methods should be used to ensure that only properly formatted data may be inputted, barring any malicious code from entering a system. This will guard against injection attacks.

Conclusion

A collaborative effort from your entire organization should go into maintaining a safe web application. Create a strategy to identify vulnerabilities, assign priorities, and address them to prevent attack efforts. Maintain a routine monitoring schedule as well by analyzing your security logs and usage trends.

For doing this successfully you will require the assistance of a professional web development company and if you are looking for one then look no further than Stellar Digital the best web development company in Delhi NCR and Gurgaon provide excellent website design and development services. connect with us by shooting us at contact@Stellardigital.in