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A single security flaw can cost millions. In 2021, Colonial Pipeline suffered a ransomware attack that disrupted fuel supplies across the U.S. East Coast, costing the company $4.4 million in ransom and enormous reputational damage. Similarly, vulnerabilities in customer-facing apps have led to high-profile data breaches in companies like Equifax, which exposed sensitive financial information for millions.
When a single vulnerability can be this costly, understanding what AppSec is becomes essential for businesses. A strong AppSec strategy minimizes downtime caused by breaches, bolsters compliance with regulatory standards, and builds customer trust.
What Is AppSec?
Application security, also known as AppSec, refers to the process of identifying, testing, and fixing security problems in applications. Rather than being a sole technology or technique, AppSec is an approach, encouraging development teams to keep their applications safe and giving them the tools to do so. The goal is to create apps and systems that both development teams and users feel confident are safe.
Why Is Application Security Important?
Businesses that embed AppSec into every development phase reduce risk. And since secure applications foster trust and reliability, security brings faster innovation and a stronger customer base.
Strong AppSec also reduces the cost of fixing vulnerabilities. It addresses them early in the development lifecycle, minimizes downtime caused by security incidents, and helps organizations stay competitive by demonstrating a commitment to protecting user data. AppSec isn’t just a defensive measure—it’s an investment in the resilience and reliability of modern applications.
6 App Security Best Practices
Let’s explore AppSec’s best practices to help you build a strategy that works for your workflow:
1. Establish an AppSec Risk Profile
Creating an AppSec risk profile begins with cataloging all your application's assets, such as sensitive user data, app interfaces, and integrated third-party services. Evaluate their sensitivity and the potential consequences of breaches. Risk profiling also involves assessing the likelihood of exploitation based on factors like the app's exposure to external threats and its history of vulnerabilities. Once you outline risks, prioritize mitigation efforts by addressing high-impact vulnerabilities first.
2. Use Threat Modeling
Threat modeling is an iterative process that evolves with your application. Identify potential adversaries and their objectives. Are they targeting financial gain, intellectual property, or system disruption? Then, consider all possible attack vectors, including user inputs and integrations. Document these threats and analyze how current security applications address them.
Adjust the model regularly to reflect changes in the application or threat landscape and keep it secure against evolving risks. Refining your threat modeling techniques aligns them with emerging security practices.
3. Understand What’s at Stake
Understanding modern security issues requires more than identifying critical data. You need to contextualize the broader impact of a data breach. For example, losing customer data violates privacy and can lead to regulatory penalties, legal actions, and loss of trust. Similarly, compromised application functionality interrupts essential operations and breaks trust with partners.
Considering these broader consequences justifies investments in security applications that align with an app's value and purpose. This helps teams focus on defending the most impactful assets without wasting effort or resources on low-risk areas.
4. Implement Secure Coding Practices
Secure coding practices prevent security vulnerabilities by designing applications to handle data safely and predictably. Validating inputs means only acceptable data is processed, reducing risks like buffer overflows or command injections. Parameterized queries also protect databases by separating code from user input and blocking SQL injection attempts.
Beyond technical fixes, regular code reviews catch errors early, while developer training keeps teams current on emerging threats and secure development techniques.
5. Conduct Regular Security Testing
Regular security testing uncovers vulnerabilities across different software lifecycle stages, reducing risks before they escalate. Static analysis tools examine the source code for flaws during development, while dynamic testing simulates attacks to find runtime vulnerabilities like authentication gaps or misconfigurations.
Application security posture management (ASPM) and cloud security posture management (CSPM) are essential components of a comprehensive strategy. ASPM provides a holistic view of app security, enabling better prioritization and management of security vulnerabilities across the entire application lifecycle. CSPM complements ASPM by focusing on cloud environments, identifying misconfigurations, and enforcing compliance to maintain a secure infrastructure.
6. Enable Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring involves real-time application performance and security tracking to detect and promptly address emerging threats. By logging and analyzing application behavior, monitoring tools identify unusual activity that may indicate an attack. This helps organizations respond dynamically, patching vulnerabilities or adjusting defenses before an issue escalates.
Additionally, continuous monitoring provides valuable insights into long-term trends, helping teams refine their security strategies and proactively mitigate risks as they evolve.
What Are Application Security Tools?
Application security tools safeguard software by automating vulnerability detection, testing for weaknesses, and monitoring applications for emerging threats. Here are some key types of AppSec tools and their functions:
SAST Tools
Static application security testing (SAST) tools analyze an application’s source code or binaries to identify weaknesses early in development. These tools catch issues like insecure coding practices before the application is built or deployed.
DAST Tools
Dynamic application security testing (DAST) tools evaluate applications while they run. By simulating attacks on a live application, DAST tools uncover vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting (XSS) and authentication flaws that may not be evident in static analysis.
SCA Tools
Modern apps use third-party libraries and open-source elements, introducing unique security risks. SCA tools identify vulnerabilities, outdated dependencies, and licensing issues in these components, helping teams mitigate risks early in development.
As applications grow more interconnected, SCA complements other tools like SAST by focusing on external dependencies. Choosing when to use SAST or SCA depends on the nature of the app and the development process.
Penetration Testing Tools
Penetration testing is a component of ASPM that mimics real-world attacks to identify weak points in the system. Pentesting tools provide insights into how attackers might exploit vulnerabilities and offer actionable recommendations for fixing them.
RASP Tools
Runtime application self-protection (RASP) tools are embedded directly into an application’s runtime environment, allowing them to detect and mitigate threats as they occur. Unlike external security measures, RASP tools have deep visibility into the application’s internal processes and user interactions. They analyze requests, responses, and execution paths in real time, blocking malicious activity or buffer overflows.
By continuously adapting to new threats without disrupting performance, RASP tools offer a highly proactive and dynamic defense mechanism tailored to the app they protect.
Vulnerability Scanners
Vulnerability scanners automate risk identification in applications and their dependencies, like third-party libraries, frameworks, or APIs. They compare the application's code and components against extensive vulnerability databases, highlighting issues like outdated software versions, unpatched flaws, or improper configurations. Advanced scanners also assess compliance with industry security standards, providing detailed reports to help prioritize fixes.
Boost Application Security With Legit Security
The Legit Security ASPM platform is a new way to manage application security in a world of AI-first development, providing a cleaner way to manage and scale AppSec and address risks. Fast to implement, easy to use, and AI-native, Legit has an unmatched ability to discover and visualize the entire software factory attack surface, including a prioritized view of AppSec data from siloed scanning tools. As a result, organizations have the visibility, context, and automation they need to quickly find, fix, and prevent the application risk that matters most. Spend less time chasing low-risk findings, more time innovating.