What Web Application Security Means and Why it Matters

A human body’s immune system protects it from harmful and deadly outside invaders and extreme conditions, keeping the body healthy and sound. That’s precisely how web application security works – it protects your web apps from outside malicious invaders like cyber-attacks and protects its integrity and health. Thus when a web application is healthy, it enables business growth, strengthens customer trust, and shields it from disastrous attacks.

So let’s explore web app security and how you can strengthen your application’s immune system.

What is Web App Security?

Web application security refers to products, strategies, and protocols to protect your digital assets like web servers, applications, and websites from malicious cyber attacks. These cyber-attacks exploit vulnerabilities in your web applications and conduct data theft, disrupt business continuity or hurt the bottom line. Besides, cyber-attacks threaten the data of your customers and can cause irreparable damage. Common web application risks include DDoS, SQL, and cross-site scripting (XSS).

Luckily, products like web application firewalls make an excellent solution to detect and prevent such attacks, protecting your application against known and unknown vulnerabilities. Other prevention techniques include multi-factor authentication (MFA) to avoid unauthorized access and testing website applications to prevent code exploitation.

Why is Web App Security Important?

Hackers are always looking out for vulnerabilities in the application, and their attacks are getting sophisticated day by day. For example, during the pandemic, the malicious emails increased by a whopping 600%, says a top United Nations Chief.

Besides, web applications store a wealth of data – from the company’s confidential information to customers’ personal information, making it a lucrative target for cybercriminals. Thus, protecting your application from these attacks is more integral than ever. So let’s take a look at the top 4 importance of protecting your web applications.

1. Protecting customer data

21st-century data breaches have left a lesson behind: never take customer data for granted. Users today are concerned about how companies store and deal with their data and form a critical aspect of their decision to do business with that company. Thus, web application security is a must to protect your customers’ data integrity.

2. Web apps are susceptible to cyber threats

The nature of web applications is ubiquitous. They can be accessed by anyone, anywhere, and at any time. Unfortunately, while this opens gates for your customers to access your digital resources, it also lets in malicious threat actors seeking weakness in your application.

Therefore, solutions like WAF detect malicious traffic and prevent it from disrupting your applications.

3. Potential to hurt the bottom line

Downtime of business-critical applications takes a direct hit on your bottom line. Especially if you’re an e-commerce or SaaS application, downtime essentially means a temporary business shutdown.

4. The threat landscape is evolving

As companies strengthen their security posture, hackers are also getting innovative with their intrusion techniques. Moreover, due to the nature of the internet, hackers can conduct crimes from anywhere globally, anonymously. This poses a huge threat to your application and puts the onus on IT leaders to stay abreast of the threat landscape and mitigate such risks.

Importance of Web Application Firewall in Mitigating Cyber Attacks

A web application firewall is your first line of defense, and it shields your applications by sitting between your applications and the internet. Working at the application layer, a web application firewall monitors and filters HTTP traffic and mitigates OWASP’s top 10 threats to protect your application from known and unknown vulnerabilities.

Learn more about Array’s Web Application Firewall and protect your applications from ever-evolving and catastrophic internet-based crimes.