5 Common Security Vulnerabilities and How to solve them
Vulnerabilities will happen till the security related processes and frameworks are strengthened, made robust and scalable. The testing team should be able to clearly understand the working of vulnerabilities and how to fix them strategically. Measures should also be taken to prevent it. There are specific automated security testing tools that help in finding and fixing vulnerabilities cohesively. In this article, you will get to know about the five common security vulnerabilities along with appropriate solutions.
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The strategic importance of identifying security vulnerabilities:
An organization’s security can be impacted by a threat/attack in the form of a vulnerability. If the vulnerability is identified and exploited by an attacker, then an organization’s reputation can be at stake. For example, ransomware attacks and data breaches come with phenomenal price tags that can go up to millions (or maybe billions) of dollars.
Hence, the platform of vulnerability management ensures that the vulnerabilities are exploited and corrected before the attacker tries to exploit it. If the vulnerabilities are identified and fixed in the early stages of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), then the costs will be comparatively much less when compared to fixing it in the later stages.
Following are the five common security vulnerabilities along with appropriate solutions:
1. Vulnerabilities related to security configuration errors: Significant vulnerabilities can be exposed by misconfigurations in code, infrastructure or other essential services. Wherever the workloads might run, still there will always be a need for credentials like access keys to connect systems, authentication keys, APIs and connectors. Cloud environments are being adopted by many organizations.
Solution: To mitigate this risk, credentials can be stored in vault solutions like terraform vault to azure key vault.
2. Improper recovery and data backup: There is a constant threat of ransomware, along with other failures and traditional disasters. Hence, data needs to be backed up and recovered by organizations. Still, there are certain organizations that lack sound recovery and backup options.
Solution: A multipronged recovery and backup strategy should be used. This should include end-user storage (often cloud-based), disk or tape backups, database storage and data center storage snapshots.
3. Vulnerabilities related to access and permission: When all of the application’s stack components are poor, there is a possibility of a significant vulnerability. As such, overall applications and systems permissions and access are on the list of vulnerabilities. Hence, access to permissions and systems needs to be tightly regulated to perform specific actions.
Solution: API permissions should be limited. The scope of interactions across various system components such as public, hybrid and internal should also be limited.
4. Inappropriate monitoring and network segmentation activities: Attackers can easily win over a weak monitoring and network segmentation platform and hence can be able to gain full access to systems in a network.
Solution: Network access should be properly controlled among systems with subnets. Better alerting and detection strategies can be built for lateral movement between systems.
5. Vulnerabilities that are inherited: Modern software often relies on open-source code and third-party libraries to develop applications. In certain scenarios, vulnerabilities are contained in these components that the application inherit.
Approximately 96% (the numbers may vary) of codebases depend on libraries or open-source code. For this reason, inheritance is considered as one of the potential threats. Vulnerabilities may vary depending on the framework and development language.
Solution: Software composition analysis, which is one of the automated vulnerability scanning tools can be employed. Through this tool, known vulnerabilities can be detected and remediated within direct and transitive dependencies.
Conclusion: If you are looking forward to implementing security testing for your specific project, then do get connected with a recognized software testing services company that will provide you with in-detail testing solutions and frameworks that can justify your project specific requirements.
