These days, it’s becoming more and more difficult to develop an application without worrying about hackers. In fact, security breaches are no longer a matter of if but rather when, and unfortunately this waiting game can be detrimental to developers, businesses, and clients.

The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has released its Top 10 Application Security Risks for 2017, and the results indicate that no industry is safe from hackers. The report found that insecure software is undermining the financial, healthcare, defence, and energy industries.

According to OWASP, technological advancements have accelerated over the last four years (2013 to 2017), and as a result, developers are facing new, complicated issues. Attackers now have several different hacking avenues they can follow that will harm a business or an organization.

So, as we move into the new year, it’s important to keep these top 10 application security risks of 2017 top of mind.

Injection

Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without the proper authorization.

Protect yourself by knowing what’s a threat to your applications.

2. Broken Authentication

Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys or session tokens. They can also be used to exploit other implementation flaws to assume users’ identities, both temporarily or permanently.

3. Sensitive Data Exposure

Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft or other crimes. Sensitive data may be compromised without extra protection, such as encryption at rest or in transit, and requires special precautions when exchanged with the browser.

4. External Entities

Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks.

5. Broken Access Control

Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access to other users’ accounts, viewing of sensitive files, modification of users’ data, changing of access rights, etc.

6. Security Misconfiguration

Security misconfiguration was 2017’s most common issue. This issue is typically a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information. Not only must all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications be securely configured, but they must be patched and upgraded in a timely fashion.

7. Cross-Site Scripting

XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping. XXS flaws can also occur if there are updates to an existing web page that has user-supplied data with a browser API that can specifically create HTML or JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser, which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites.

8. Insecure Deserialization

Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks.

Secure your online data and protect your applications from devastating hacks.

9. Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities

Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts.

10. Insufficient Logging and Monitoring

Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further penetrate systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems, and tamper, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies found that the time required to detect a breach is more than 200 days, and that breaches are typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

And there you have it, the top ten application security risks that developers are facing today. Although these are of grave concern to developers, cyber crime should also be a concern to businesses and organizations. To help organizations and developers reduce their application security risks, the buglab platform is using their crowdsourcing cybersecurity model to detect and remedy vulnerabilities on IoT devices, smart contracts, applications, and websites via a pentesting process known as a contest. For more information on how buglab works, click here. To sign up for a buglab contest, click here.

About Buglab

The buglab solution detects and remedies vulnerabilities on various business applications, websites, mobile applications, IoT devices , and smart contracts by transforming penetration test services into challenges, referred to as contests, for a community of independent information security consultants with certified qualifications.

The buglab project is moving towards implementing blockchain capabilities, so be sure to stay tuned for website and white paper updates, as well as project information. For project updates, sign up for the buglab newsletter. In the meantime, follow the buglab team on Telegram, Facebook, Twitter,Instagram, and LinkedIn.