Web Security Threats – What to Do?

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Web application security is important to all. This is because, with the cybercrime rate increasing, it is better to secure the data that goes out and in the systems through different servers from both the client’s side and the applications’ side. So many organizations like OWASP work to produce standards or web application security-definitions and details. The organizations have defined top most threats and vulnerabilities by the name of OWASP top ten or the SANS web application security threatening issues.

Rise of Web Security

Information security encompasses the web applications security area.  This field deals in websites, web applications, and website marketing services. At a higher scale of security, the principles are defined based on the internet and whole worldwide web security details. As the web applications are needed to be secure, the code scanning and security providing tools are based on the programming languages that the applications are made in like Java, VB.NET, .NET framework, C#, ASP, PHP, Python and Ruby etc.

How Security Threats Arise?

Social networking has increased so much in operations that with the involvement of Web 2.0, the increased web based businesses have led to threats or web threats to data shared, links built and blogs used for marketing. This is how the websites become the target of security threats from hackers and automatic security breaches. Through the help of ‘drive-by-downloading’, the hackers take on the websites and end user application data. Security is easily compromised and they can reach to the heights of data manipulation, exploitation and use data for their advantage to generate money.

While the security applications work side by side the web servers, there are always manual and automatic tools to scan out the coding of pages with respect to security. People save money and perform manual checking, which has the following issues:

1. Time consuming
2. Waste of resources
3. No clue of the actual vulnerabilities to be found
4. Too much fake vulnerabilities working to hide the actual ones
5. High number of false positives
6. Skills not being used to identify real ambiguities or updated for newer ones to arrive etc

That is why, it is now recommended to go for the automatic source code scanning so that, data loss, theft, hacking, and manipulation of data can be avoided.  The security threats occur from either XSS (cross side scripting) or SQL injection. The issues are written in the SANS 25 lists and the OWASP top 10 lists. The automatic scanning tools can help negate the effects of all of them.

This will help secure the input/output of data from machines into the servers and systems and without any loss or exploitation of data; it can be retrieved on the other side. Hackers will not be able to use or sell data to the respective competitors of companies through which data is taken out and overall cybercrime rate can be decreased.

For details, OWASP foundation website can be contacted or SANS website with information on the threats and web security vulnerabilities can be learnt into. The rise in the threats needs information on them to be spread out so that they can be dealt with, in time.

Author Bio:

This guest contribution is made by Azam. He has extensive experience in writing posts and user guides on different software and technology related topics such as SANS 25, OWASP, etc. He also writes for http://www.checkmarx.com which Identify software security vulnerabilities and fix them.

Tags: internet security, internet Security Threats, online security, online Security Threats, Web Security, Web Security Threats

Category: Security, Tech