“Hackers only need a small security flaw to penetrate into servers not only harming your data and applications but in turn, also impacting business continuity and reputation.”
Increasing presence on internet demands higher level of security. Same way, enterprises are moving to cloud for residing their valuable data and applications. All this attracts potential risks, especially in terms of virus, ransomware, and malware. In fact, hackers only need a small security flaw to penetrate into your servers thus causing a big harm to your data and applications. Not only that, this in turn, also impacts business continuity and reputation. In addition, there are huge financial losses due to heavy ransom demand for unlocking or decrypting your data. Any vulnerability in code can produce leakages and security gaps. Though there are many leakage possibilities of that you need to think of while writing a code. As a matter of fact, testing has to be the strongest area in the whole development cycle. You need to find the best of the tools, methodologies, and skill to tackle that.
Security flaws can land an Enterprise into big trouble
The most common gap in coding causing security flaw is Hidden Field Manipulation. This is most prominent in e-commerce portals. On the other hand, you need to adopt extra protection for an e-commerce website due to the kind of transactions it handles. Recently there was a case reporting a billion of loss during a month due to amounts getting debited from the company account instead of customer’s accounts for purchase transactions. Was it due to a flaw in code or an intentional move by an employee is yet to ascertain. In Hidden Field Manipulation, applications encapsulate some hidden fields within web pages. Due to immature handling of coding standards some of these fields carrying highly crucial information might land a company into a big trouble.
The second most common factor responsible for security flaws due to code vulnerability is Cross-site Scripting. This, in fact, is more prone to happen because of careless coding. It becomes a golden gate for hackers letting them steal sessions or inject malicious content thus defacing a webpage to vulnerable content or redirecting users to malicious sites.
The third most common loophole in coding is Cross-site Request Forgery. This kind of Security Flaw happens due to negligence of coders while coding. If a code doesn’t understand the value of random tokens and re-authentication on a critical data transaction page, it could cause havoc. In fact, if these two factors are missing an attacker becomes free to perform transactions on behalf of users. Depending on the accessibility rights of a user, the intruder can cause any volume of damage to an organization.
By: Jaideep Khanduja, Regional Director, ApON Innovative Solutions
