A Strong Web Security Strategy Protects Your Customers, Employees, and Business

A strong web security strategy protects your customers, employees, and business from ransomware, malware, hacking, defacement, data theft, unethical competition, and other cyber vandalism that can cost your organization time, money, reputation, or even its existence. It’s vital that your team stays up to date on the latest threats and has robust strategies in place to stop them.

Keeping up with web security is a full-time job, because the number of threats in the wild continues to rise. Every day new zero-day attacks are introduced and exploit existing infrastructure that doesn’t have the right protections in place. It’s also important to remember that even the most sophisticated hackers can get around the best defenses.

Web applications are vulnerable to a wide range of attack techniques, from SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) to remote file inclusion and web-based backdoors. These vulnerabilities can allow attackers to modify or drop database tables, steal login credentials, and perform a variety of other malicious actions.

A web application firewall (WAF) provides protection against these vulnerabilities by monitoring traffic to and from your website or web applications. WAFs monitor both the network and the application layer for suspicious activity, blocking unauthorized access while allowing legitimate requests to pass through. This helps prevent data leaks, exploitation of known vulnerabilities, and DDoS attacks that saturate your servers with fake requests to interrupt or disable normal service.

In addition to a WAF, you can use other security tools to help stop web threats, such as URL filters that block phishing campaigns and malware delivery, sandboxing appliances that run code in isolation from the rest of your environment, and TLS/SSL decryption that breaks open inbound and outbound encrypted traffic to inspect its contents and re-encrypt it for further travel. A comprehensive threat-detection solution should include all of these technologies to provide complete protection.

When your competitors have weak security, your users will go elsewhere, and the reputation of your company may be ruined. By contrast, a secure site instills confidence in your clients and employees, which can boost sales and growth. It’s worth the investment to protect your business from damage to your customers, your revenue stream, and your brand.

A strong web security program must include the participation of all members of your development team. Web applications are built by developers, DevOps engineers, QA testers, and CI/CD pipelines before moving to production, and each of these groups needs to understand how to spot security flaws in their own work. Educating everyone on the basics of web security can prevent attackers from using the smallest holes in your defenses to gain access to critical information, steal customer data, and wreak havoc. It’s a crucial way to keep your business running smoothly and your competition a step behind.