App security in the modern world matters. If you look around, you will see that there are lots of apps that are available for free on the internet as well as for a nominal amount.
All these apps are specially designed to perform different functions to meet your different needs. You will find and app for:
- Playing games
- Making a monetary transaction
- Hire a cab
- Book a ticket or a table in a restaurant and even
- Buy your weekly grocery.
However, there is always a question of security for these apps, especially if it involves making a purchase or making a monetary transaction.
The app developers are constantly on the lookout for ways to make the apps safest and most secure.
Importance Of Segregation
When it comes to ensuring the security aspect of an app. It is important that you segregate during the development process.
It is also required to test in on different live environments that will help you to know about the gaps and drawbacks in it making it easier for you to fix them firsthand.
It is vitally important to segregate live environments from the testing and development environments. This is because:
- This will prevent mixing the two environments.
- This will in turn prevent you from inviting hackers into your web application.
Typically, it is seen that during developing or even troubleshooting a web app, the developers normally leave behind traces. These traces can be easily found by malicious hackers who can use it and craft a program that will help them attack a web application.
For example, debug is one such thing that can be used by hackers to uncover sensitive information about the milieu of the web app that has left it enabled.
Using this, the hackers can log files that contain sensitive information regarding the database setup that may be left unaddressed on the website.
Development And Troubleshooting
In order to prevent malicious users to access such important data on the sly, it is extremely important to do any development or troubleshooting job in staging environs. This is because:
- The administrator can apply the adjustments made in the live environment once the development and testing of a web app is completed
- The administrator can also ensure that none of the changes applied to the live environment do not pose any threats to the security and
- The administrator can be sure that no files such as the source code file or the log files that contain very sensitive technical info, comments and data are uploaded to the server.
This will ensure that especially sensitive sites such as Nationaldebtrelief.com and different apps that are used for monetary transactions are safe to the core and the hilt.
Segregation Of The Data
Special care for safety and security should be taken by the app developers while dealing with the data.
Almost like the above, the same principle applies while segregating the data itself: not to keep the non-related info in one single database.
These sensitive data include different forms such as:
- Customers credit card numbers and details
- Website user activities and others.
Typically, such different data should be stored in different databases by using diverse database users.
In addition to that, it is required to apply the same concept for segregation on the operating system as well as on the web application files.
Idyllically, when it comes to specific web application files such as the directory that is typically published on the web server must be essentially segregated and stored on a separate drive that is different from the log files and operating system.
This is an effective approach that will enable you to prevent these important facts and data of the operating system files to the hackers out there, irrespective of the fact that they have been successful in exploiting the vulnerability on the web server.
Installing Security Patches
Make sure that you always install security patches. This is one of the most significant steps in ensuring any type of security to the web app. Unfortunately, this is also the most common aspect that is overlooked by the app developers.
The importance of such security patches is immense. Therefore, make sure that you use latest and most advanced version of the software that you want to use for your web app development process.
In addition to that make sure that you use the security patches of the vendor. In doing so you will be able to ensure that the malicious hackers are not able to uncover and exploit any of the known security vulnerability that may exist in the specific software that you are using.
Monitoring And Auditing
In order to ensure that your web app designed is perfectly safe and stays like that you will need to tack and audit the servers and logs from time to time.
Server log files, just as the name implies, are those that are used to maintain a record of everything that has happened and is happening on the server.
It is a wrong thing to do if it only consumes an unlimited amount of space of the hard disk. There are lots of benefits of monitoring and analyzing the log files of the servers from time to time such as:
- The administrators can easily discover a lot of information
- Any suspicious behavior on the server can be detected at the earliest and
- It will help in ensuring better protection to the web server.
All these will help you to prevent an attack by any unscrupulous hacker. Even if it happens due to some other reason it will be easy for you to trace back such an attack and know the specific reason of it.
You will know what had happened and the specific thing that was exploited by the malevolent hacker enabling him or her to make such an attack.
The Final Tip
Use the best security tools in addition to the web application security scanner. Use network security scanner to scan the web server as well. Finally, always stay informed about the web application security industry.
This is a guest post article by Isabella Rossellini
