How to Counter Cyber Attacks - RNS Solutions Research lab

In the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing made on April 4, Block (a company that was formerly known as Square) acknowledged that the Cash App had been breached by a former employee in December of 2021. The leak included customers’ names, brokerage account numbers, and other data, such as portfolio value and stock trading activity. Cyber Security attacks are not an anomaly since the internet has become a common commodity.

Recent findings by IBM and Ponemon Institute revealed that larger firms spend over $3.5 million dollars, on average, in tidying up after a single cybersecurity breach. Cyber criminals are getting resourceful by the day so the need to develop secure softwares is now imperative. Companies are now prioritizing security of softwares. This is why our world is experiencing an exponential growth in the cybersecurity industry.?

Most developers ignore vulnerabilities in their code and focus on its performance. While some developers do focus on software security whether it is because their company demands it or for their personal satisfaction, they tend to use externally sourced APIs and SDKs that have known safe code for their coding practices.

On the other hand, some companies consider their code secure if they do not face a breach during its development phase. Companies push their developers to meet deadlines which leaves room for cyber attacks as writing a secure code is not the priority there. Moreover, some developers lack the knowledge on how to write secure code and this fault lies with both parties, the developers as well as their company.

Now how do we fend off these breaches? Well, there are certain practices that can be implemented on different levels to develop secure softwares:

When companies hire developers, they should regularly train them in software security. Running simulations and team practices will help prepare the team in case of cyber attacks. We can prevent security risks by putting in time towards building security during the design phase. This will help developers identify security breaches and dangerous software defects before the application goes live. Otherwise, it would have a negative impact on the stakeholders and users of the software.?

To store passwords, developers use encryption which comes with the risk of someone finding the decryption key and that could compromise the software. This can be avoided if developers adopt the practice of hashing which is more secure as it is a one way function. Employing a project security officer to supervise security of software would make the company’s security system more efficient.???

Software development processes are not well defined and development environments are mostly focused on features instead of security consideration in mind. These are a few common mistakes and challenges that are faced by software development firms. Many Software development firms face challenges to access rights of their development team members to relevant information only. Most of the firms and developers love using open source and third party libraries for easy features development. Open Source and third party libraries are full of bugs and malware.?

API security is another challenge and many developers do not care while developing APIs and few only use API gateway. Another challenge is their CI/CD pipelines having vulnerabile packages and open source solutions. Some CI/CD solutions are misconfigured or not configured at all. Devops ignore Infrastructure security entirely and focus on high availability.?

Having software security part of software development life cycle (SDLC) is integral as resolving bugs and vulnerabilities sooner would reduce the chances of cyber attacks. Moreover, risk analysis needs to be properly conducted to fish out any issue or liability that a cyber attacker might exploit. Penetration test is one of the analytical tests used to identify software vulnerabilities that a cyber attacker may exploit. Periodical security audits can also help to improve processes and cyber security challenges.

Thus, it is important that software developers understand the significance of software security and incorporate security protocols during the design phase. And when bugs are detected, they should be addressed quickly.

All in all, a software cannot be cleared threat proof for life as with new advancements in technology industry, hackers are advancing as well and they can penetrate and cause irreversible loss to the software they attack. It is vital that the software get checked by pen testing tools on regular intervals (experts suggest 3 months interval).

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