Application security: 2 Steps to Improve Your Secure Engineering

Application Security is rising on the CIO priority list. Looking to avoid big breaches, chief executives and boards are investing more in information security than ever before – reaching more than $90 billion this year.

With the rising prevalence of security postures, ideas and goals, there’s a lot of noise in the market about how to build the best AppSec program. But there are two main steps that should not be ignored. 

1. Invest in Static Application Security Testing

As we wrote in December, Forrester suggests that “[U]sing static application security testing (SAST) as part of prerelease application testing can remove vulnerabilities so attackers can’t exploit them in production. SAST remains the best prerelease testing tool for catching tricky data flow issues and issues such as cross-site request forgery (CSRF) that tools such as dynamic application security testing (DAST) have trouble finding.”

SAST solutions are gaining steam, and they are an important compliment to dynamic (DAST) and interactive (IAST) security testing practices.

2. Prioritize Application Security Violation Findings 

Conducting a contextual analysis of software can help reduce false positives that are frequently flagged by traditional code checking tools. In addition, contextual software analysis helps find more complex and sophisticated flaws, such as:

-Malicious code gaining forbidden access to data
-Lack of input validation
-Back door entry points

Most solutions that identify these vulnerabilities can be further customized to prioritize security violations important to your specific organization. It’s important to consider the OWASP Top 10 and CWE Top 25 most dangerous software errors in these cases.



Following these two primary steps will help you build a better AppSec program that identifies complex software risks that have higher potential to cause disruption in business operations.