Security is an essential part of any modern web application, playing a key role in protecting sensitive user data, maintaining operational integrity, and ensuring that you keep the trust of your many users. This applies to any kind of online application, whether it’s used for personal, business, or even governmental functions. With even a single breach, any large or small company can be subjected to large financial losses, legal problems, and reputational damage that can be hard to fix.
It isn’t just a small number of companies either. According to a 2017 study by the 6th International Conference on Reliability, Infocom Technologies and Optimization (ICRITO), a security evaluation center performed an analysis of over 250 e-commerce applications, online banking, and corporate sites, reporting that “more than 85% of web applications are vulnerable to attacks” with 63% containing vulnerabilities related to cross site scripting, 51% with information leakage problems, and 25% with vulnerabilities to cross site request forgery.
By understanding the importance of web app security and how to keep your cloud-based applications safe, you can take charge and protect your assets, maintain compliance with any standards and regulations, and develop trust with users across the globe as they enjoy your internet application.
What Are the Components of Web Application Security?
Web application security isn’t made of a single all-in-one solution, but a variety of components such as tools, technologies, and best practices that together protect your application from different threats. By keeping your internet app secure, you protect its functionality, any sensitive data, and preserve user trust.
The components that make up the foundation of cloud-based app security include:
- Authentication: Verifies users who are trying to access an internet application.
- Authorization and Access Control: Ensures that users prove their identity via tools like multi-factor authentication (MFA) and session management and are only able to use the application resources that they are supposed to use based on their role-based access control (RBAC).
- Data Protection: Refers to the encrypting of data both while in transit and at rest, preventing unauthorized interception or leaks as well as cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
- Input Validation: Ensures the sanitization of all inputs to prevent code injection attacks. Some examples include URL parameters and form submissions like email addresses and social security numbers.
- Secure APIs: Refers to the prevention of unauthorized data being exchanged when APIs interact with other services or applications.
- Vulnerability Management and Regular Assessments: This refers to the use of regular penetration testing and automated tools for static and dynamic testing. Some organizations even use bug bounty programs to encourage ethical hackers to report any vulnerabilities they find.
As cyber threats continue to evolve and grow more sophisticated, prioritizing and implementing each of these security components has become important for businesses and organizations of all sizes to protect against malicious actors.
Why is Web Application Security Important?
Web application security is important as it safeguards both organizations and users while ensuring regulatory compliance in sensitive industries where standards such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR mandate robust protection measures.
The risks of an unsecure cloud-based app include data breaches, financial fraud, IP theft, and unauthorized access. When a data breach occurs, organizations like yours can become the target of legal troubles, regulatory fines, reputational damage, and of course, the loss of customer trust.
In today’s digital ecosystem, your web application isn’t just a service – it’s the front door to your organization’s most valuable assets.
Unfortunately, most web apps are far more vulnerable than the organizations that own them realize.
To help illustrate the vulnerability of improperly secured web applications, a 2014 study in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing used a Vulnerability & Attack Injector Tool (VAIT) to test three web applications to see how vulnerable they were. The researchers found that for one, they were able to inject 7 vulnerabilities and only 4 (57%) of those vulnerabilities were exploited and attacked successfully. For a second online application, 14 vulnerabilities were injected and all 14 (100%) vulnerabilities were attacked successfully. Finally, for the third internet app, the researchers had 33 vulnerabilities injected and 25 (76%) of vulnerabilities were exploited and attacked successfully. In all, over half of vulnerabilities were able to be exploited and attacked successfully.
What Common Threats Exist for Web Applications
Web applications are highly accessible due to their global nature. While that is convenient for customers and users alike, it means malicious actors from anywhere can try to exploit vulnerabilities, steal credentials, disrupt services, and inject malicious code. Common types of attacks can include:
- SQL Injection Attacks: A common and dangerous threat where an attacker exploits a web app’s poorly secured query inputs and injects malicious SQL code to manipulate and extract sensitive data from the application’s database. This can be defended against with strong input validation.
- Cross-Site Scripting (XSS): These attacks occur when an attacker injects malicious scripts into a web application to steal session cookies, redirect users to phishing sites, and deface online applications in other ways. Input sanitization of user input fields can help prevent this.
- Distributed Denial-Of-Service (DDoS): These kinds of attacks aim to overwhelm a cloud-based application via flooding them with too much traffic. A mix of load balancing, blocking of unused ports, and a restriction of traffic to specific locations can help prevent a DDoS attack from succeeding.
- Malware and Ransomware: Malware can be used to steal sensitive data without organizations or users knowing. Ransomware can lock an internet application’s systems out in an attempt to force payment, leading to operational disruption, revenue loss, and damage to user confidence. From firewalls and antivirus measures to robust data backups and strong user authentication, there are multiple ways to help prevent these kinds of attacks. Organization members and users should also be educated about proper cyber hygiene.
- Phishing Tactics: Attempts by malicious actors to steal sensitive information, gain access to user accounts, steal money, and install malware on web applications or user devices. Types of phishing include email phishing, smishing, vishing, spear phishing, and whaling. Prevent phishing by educating your organization and users in how to detect phishing scams, strong password practices, and utilizing multi-factor authentication.
- Vulnerabilities in APIs: Unsecure APIs are vulnerable to unauthorized access and injection attacks. Some ways to mitigate API security vulnerabilities are to use input validation and sanitization, strong authentication and authorization, rate limiting and throttling, and even having alerts for when suspicious amounts of API requests are being made.
The above security threats can often be prevented through secure coding practices, yet a 2024 study from University College of Cork Ireland found that only 39.6% of respondents had been offered secure coding training.
To help bridge this gap, developers can leverage various tools and technologies to improve web application security.
What Tools Can Be Used to Enhanced Web App Security?
Along with the best practices described in the above section, there are tools that organizations or their software development partners may use to identify, prevent, and mitigate security threats to their web applications. Today’s modern security tools offer a variety of capabilities ranging from automated scanning and real-time monitoring to advanced threat detection.
Some of these tools include the likes of vulnerability scanners that also do penetration testing, API security tools that perform rate limiting and throttling, real-time monitoring tools, data encryption with methods like Transport Layer Security (TLS), and web application firewalls or WAF.
- Vulnerability scanners like Burp Suite and Netsparker perform vulnerability assessments and even penetration testing.
- API security tools including Wallarm Security Platform, Salt Security, and 42Crunch can use rate limiting and throttling to prevent attacks.
- Real-time monitoring and threat detection tools like Datadog and Splunk can alert you to unusual traffic patterns and unauthorized access attempts.
- Data protection and encryption tools used by cloud services like Azure and AWS can ensure your data is protected both in transit and at rest.
- Web application firewalls, such as those provided by Cloudflare, Azure, and AWS, protect cloud-based applications by filtering and monitoring HTTP traffic.
According to a 2013 study from the IEEE Eleventh International Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems on web application firewalls and different WAF providers, it was found that there were “over 141 confirmed data breaches from 2009 which resulted in the compromise of 143 million records. The majority of breaches and data stolen in 2009 (95%) was through hacking ‘servers and applications’”. But by using WAFs and the other tools mentioned above, you can ensure there’s no easy way for malicious actors to breach your internet application.
What Should Your Next Steps Be to Secure Your Web App?
As of December 2024, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had reported that by mid-2024 there had already been over 2,300 incidents of ransomware attacks, with over half of those being against US organizations. At the rate it was going, the report went on to suggest that 2024 was well on its way to exceeding the global number of 4,506 attacks in 2023. That’s just ransomware!
Before choosing a partner for your next application or software project, your next step should be to make sure that a potential developer is knowledgeable in best practices, current strategies, and tools to safeguard your investment.