A Layered Approach to Web Security
Web security protects websites, web applications, and third-party services from attacks that expose sensitive information or lead to a denial of service (DDOS). In addition, it ensures that work-from-anywhere employees can access the web securely from any device. A strong web security strategy can help businesses avoid costly cyberattacks and build brand trust with customers.
The internet has enabled the world to become highly interconnected, but it’s also exposed more data, applications, and infrastructure to attack. Threat actors capitalize on these broader attack surfaces to steal money, infect systems, and cause extortion and disruptions.
To mitigate these threats, security teams regularly implement and monitor best practices. They also deploy tools that detect unauthorized attempts to gain access to networks and prevent them from infiltrating systems, servers, and databases. In addition, they update and patch software to eliminate vulnerabilities attackers exploit.
These security measures are effective, but they can’t stop all attacks. Increasingly, attackers are leveraging advanced techniques to penetrate defenses and steal data or disrupt operations. For example, attackers use cross-site scripting to inject malicious code into a website, and SQL injection to hijack database processes and execute malicious queries.
The most common attack vectors are unpatched systems, misconfigured services and plugins, and unsecured data. A thorough web security assessment examines these components to identify gaps and remediate them. In addition, it simulates attacks to evaluate the effectiveness of security controls.
A comprehensive web security assessment includes a review of all the hardware and software systems that touch the web. This includes servers, firewalls, databases, and application frameworks. It also examines third-party services and applications that could be entry points for attack vectors. A comprehensive analysis should also identify any outdated systems, patches, and configurations that aren’t in compliance with industry best practices.
A secure web gateway (SWG) appliance sits between an organization’s endpoints and the Internet, inspecting traffic and requests that travel in both directions. It typically uses a “stack” of appliances—including firewalls, URL and DNS filters, sandboxing, and malware detection—to provide holistic coverage to prevent policy violations, malware infections, data loss, and other cybercrimes.
A layered approach to security protects against the most common attack vectors, including malicious redirects, SQL injection, and Cross-Site Scripting. This approach is more effective than relying on a single technology, which is prone to blind spots and can fail to prevent certain types of attacks. A SWG also enables organizations to apply HTTP Strict-Transport-Security headers to restrict the features available to browsers in nonsecure contexts. This helps prevent man-in-the-middle attacks and prevents attackers from using powerful features in an insecure context to take over your website and steal your data. A SWG solution is also more cost-effective than purchasing multiple separate appliances to cover the same functions. It is also easier to manage and scale than a traditional hardware-based approach. In addition, a SWG is less susceptible to performance limitations and can handle TLS/SSL decryption, which is used by nearly all web traffic today.