The Software Behind Today’s Cyberattacks
As software is incorporated into critical infrastructure transport, healthcare, and personal devices, the effects of lax software security magnify. Adversaries are constantly probing systems seeking vulnerabilities to exploit. Software that isn’t secure can be abused for fraud, data breaches and other criminal actions.
The key to secure software is to avoid attacks before they happen. This requires a combination of practices, including updating software and patching. It also means implementing an encrypting architecture and the most effective programming practices, including encryption, data validation and programming languages that safely manage memory allocations.
There are a myriad of commercially-available solutions (COTS) that can assist you in ensuring that your system is secure. If you’re developing your own software or are part of a DevOps team, the aim is to integrate security into the development process so it is built into the application right away. This reduces the amount of work required to fix problems in production.
The benefits of designing security into software are far greater than the cost. By using security-by design methodologies and best practices frameworks, software makers can limit the number and severity of security vulnerabilities that get into production, limit the amount of undiscovered vulnerabilities and swiftly address any new vulnerabilities that develop. Since it’s six times more expensive to fix a bug in production, it’s crucial to do it right the first time.