The software behind today’s cyberattacks
As software becomes deeply integrated into critical infrastructure transportation, healthcare, and personal devices, the consequences of insecure software can be devastating. Cybercriminals are always scouring systems to discover vulnerabilities. Software that is not properly secure can be exploited for extortion, data breaches and other criminal activities.
The key to securing software is to stop attacks before they happen. This requires a mix of practices including patching and keeping software up to date and using the principle of least privilege. This also implies having an encrypting architecture and the most effective programming practices, including data validation, cryptography, and programming languages that can safely manage memory allocations.
Nowadays, there are a number of commercially-available solutions (COTS) to help ensure that your system is safe. However, if you’re building software from scratch or are part of a DevOps team, the goal is to integrate security into the development process to ensure it’s built into your application right away. This cuts down on the amount of work required to fix problems in production.
The benefits of designing software security outweigh any costs. Utilizing security-by-design methodologies and best practice frameworks software producers can reduce the number and impact of security vulnerabilities that get into production, limit the amount of undiscovered vulnerabilities and address quickly any new vulnerabilities that are discovered. It’s six times more expensive to fix a production bug, so it’s important to fix it on the first try.