The Application Threat
Application vulnerabilities have become increasingly common in recent years. In 2021, 20,169 new Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) were added to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). This represents an over 10% increase in the number of vulnerabilities discovered in production applications from the 18,325 identified the previous year.
The rapid growth in new application vulnerabilities is outpacing organizations’ ability to identify, test, and deploy patches to correct these issues. As a result, companies are commonly running applications that contain exploitable vulnerabilities.
By exploiting these vulnerabilities, a cyber threat actor can achieve various goals. A successful exploit could lead to an expensive and damaging data breach or enable an attacker to deploy ransomware or other malware within an organization’s IT environment. Alternatively, some vulnerabilities may be used to perform a Denial of Service (DoS) attack against corporate systems, rendering them unable to provide services to the organization and its customers.
Common Application Vulnerability Exploits
While novel exploits and zero days are created on a regular basis, these often take advantage of a small set of vulnerabilities. Many of these vulnerabilities have been known for years but continue to appear within application code.
The OWASP Top Ten List is a well-known resource that highlights some of the most common and impactful vulnerabilities that appear in applications (with a focus on web applications). The current version of the OWASP Top Ten list was released in 2021 and includes the following ten vulnerabilities:
- Broken Access Control
- Cryptographic Failures
- Injection
- Insecure Design
- Security Misconfiguration
- Vulnerable and Outdated Components
- Identification and Authentication Failures
- Software and Data Integrity Failures
- Security Logging and Monitoring Failures
- Server-Side Request Forgery
This list describes general classes of vulnerabilities with a focus on the root causes of an issue. The Common Weaknesses Enumeration (CWE) provides information on specific instances of a particular issue. Each of the OWASP Top Ten vulnerabilities contains a list of one or more associated CWEs. For example, Cryptographic Failures includes a list of twenty-nine mapped CWEs such as using a hard-coded cryptographic key or improper verification of cryptographic signatures.
The Need for Application Security
Companies are increasingly dependent on IT systems and applications to perform core business processes and to provide services to their customers. These applications have access to highly sensitive data and are critical to the operation of the business.
Application security (AppSec) is vital to an organization’s ability to protect customer data, maintain services, and comply with legal and regulatory obligations. Application vulnerabilities can have significant impacts on a company and its customers, and remediating them costs significant time and resources. By identifying and remediating vulnerabilities early in the software development lifecycle, an organization can minimize the cost and impact of these vulnerabilities on the organization.
Comprehensive AppSec with CloudGuard AppSec
A strong AppSec program integrates security into every stage of an application’s lifecycle from initial design to end-of-life, including both application security testing and protection at runtime with web application and API protection (WAAP). To learn more about securing your organization’s applications, check out this AppSec whitepaper.
As applications increasingly move to the cloud, cloud workload protection becomes a crucial component of an AppSec program. Learn more about securing your cloud workloads with this cloud application security ebook. Then, see how Check Point’s CloudGuard AppSec can help to enhance your organization’s application security by signing up for a free demo.
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