Application Encryption and Security
As organizations continue to integrate more applications into their environment, application security becomes a growing concern. Gartner uses a helpful metaphor for thinking about applications security:
- Applications are like a pirate’s treasure chest, and sensitive data is the cache inside.
So, how are cybercriminals raiding your cache & what can your organization do to ensure the protection of applications and the data within?
The Need for Application Security
Application security is a growing concern for businesses across the board. More traditionally non-tech companies find themselves, on top of their normal operations, as software developers these days and, even those who aren’t, rely on applications interacting with their business critical data. Protecting this data is of the utmost importance. Organizations need to:
- Protect sensitive data entered into their applications
- Safeguard the business rules, algorithms, schema, and procedures incorporated therein
- Prevent data tinkering by curious users, network administrators, etc.
- Protect DLLs (including DotNet DLLs) from reverse engineering
This, essentially, defines application security: guarding against external threats by securing the software the business deploys, detecting and preventing vulnerabilities in all of the applications. Using a piratical metaphor, Gartner describes applications a treasure chest, and sensitive information as the cache within.
Raiding the Cache
Software vulnerabilities, meanwhile, are inevitably a tempting point of access for cyber criminals looking to compromise sensitive data. All applications have these weaknesses, from financial solutions to government and more. According to Veracode’s State of Software Security Report, about 70% overall contain at least one or two severe vulnerabilities. Moreover, a report from WhiteHat Security finds that the specific industries of information technology (IT), education and retail are the most prone, usually hosting between 10 and 20 of these critical flaws.
For a number of industries, there are also around 50% of applications that remain vulnerable in perpetuity. “This means that there are thousands of vulnerabilities across the average organization’s web applications,” says Tamir Hardof, Chief Marketing Officer at WhiteHat, adding, “Unfortunately, what this year’s report tells us once again is that organizations are not really relying on risk levels as a baseline to inform their application security strategies.”
Remediation of these vulnerabilities remains a problem, as well. This is particularly true for the most critical and complex ones. In IT alone, the remediation rate is less than 25%, and those vulnerabilities that are can take around 35 weeks to fix. In fact, this rate dropped between 2013 and 2015 from a high of nearly 50%. Banking also saw a rate shrink from 52 to 42%.
It is therefore imperative that organizations develop a comprehensive security strategy from the outset. Before even deciding on tools and solutions, priorities must be made along the lines of risk identification, assessment, fixes, learning from past mistakes and better planning for the future.
What’s the solution?
NetLib Security’s patented data security platform, Encryptionizer, transparently integrates application-level encryption into existing applications, while making no modifications. Our product enables you to develop your applications without worrying about built-in encryption, as Encryptionizer layers itself atop the application, thereby requiring no changes.
By using our Encryptionizer software to secure your applications, you ensure that only your select applications can access your encrypted databases. It also offers protection for your desktop database and digital content applications.
At NetLib Security, we understand cybersecurity threats cannot be completely eliminated. However, companies should take steps to ensure they are as well protected as possible. Toward that end, working with developers across all industries who want to secure their applications and intellectual property, we provide the tools to defend against, and mitigate to the maximum possible extent, all such risks.