Malicious actors — like any thieves — live by a simple rule: If the front door is locked, break the window.

It’s why threats like fileless malware and crypto-jacking have seen substantial gains over last few years. It’s why — despite increasing employee education and IT training — hackers are still hooking phish by developing more sophisticated and authentic-looking email spoofs. Cybercriminal communities, meanwhile, continue to grow on the dark web, allowing attackers to share info, purchase exploit kits and identify potential targets.

What does this mean for CISOs? That typical defense efforts are being outpaced as familiar attack vectors are replaced with non-traditional threats. But it’s not all bad news; here are three questions every CISO needs to ask to help close the doors, bolt the windows and leave hackers out in the cold.

Gabriel, you have been in the security industry for over 2 decades. You have seen many different tools and services. Why create a company around something as specific as obfuscation and in-app protection?

Our customers build a lot of really innovative apps that enable their users and customers to do new and cool things. These apps frequently run on untrusted client computers/devices and they control access to customer’s sensitive data or critical devices.

And after all the effort of designing, building, debugging, and deploying their applications, the last thing they want is for an attacker to steal their work or use it to look for vulnerabilities to break into their system.

Long ago, we built a Java code optimizer, but it became clear to us that our customer cared more about the obfuscation effects of the optimization than the actual performance improvement. That is when we really began to focus on app protection. First with Java, then .NET, Android, iOS, Xamarin, JavaScript, etc.

Gartner calls In-App Protection “crucial” in their July 2019 Market Guide for In-App Protection. The guide’s summary advises security and risk management leaders to “take due care in protecting their application clients” in order to avoid “security failure.”

This raises the question – what constitutes “due care?” Obviously, no development organization looks to recklessly expose their applications or sensitive data to attack or compromise. On the other hand, over-engineered (or poorly engineered) security controls can quickly lead to excessive development costs, performance and quality issues, and, ultimately, unacceptable user experiences. While terms and terminology may vary, there is broad consensus on how to best define “due care” for any given application/user scenario.

If you don’t follow application security closely, you might think of application obfuscation and symbol renaming as being synonymous – and with good reason. Many platforms and languages, like .NET, Java, and JavaScript have popular obfuscators that do little else--our own Dotfuscator Community Edition for .NET and ProGuard for Java are good examples. However, obfuscation is far more than symbol renaming – and in-app protection is far more than obfuscation. Much of this expansion has been driven by new security requirements, shifting attack vectors, the rise of mobile and IoT computing and, lastly, the growing recognition inside regulations and legislation of the exposure that can result from inadequately protected software.

Can you tell the difference? Exception or the norm?

Of course, everyone is “for security” in principle. The hard question that each organization has to answer for themselves is “how much is enough?” Over-engineering is (by definition) excessive, and over-engineering application security can, in fact, be devastating as overly-complex algorithms, architectures and processes can compromise user experience, degrade performance and slow development velocity. On the other hand, punishment is swift for organizations that cut corners and do not effectively secure their applications, their data and, most importantly their users and business stakeholders. Finding and maintaining that balance can be time consuming and, because you can never be sure you’ve gotten it exactly right, it can also be a thankless job.

JavaScript is everywhere. It’s currently the world’s most popular programming language; as noted by GitHub, JavaScript has the highest number of contributors and repositories, handily outpacing other alternatives such as Python, PHP and Ruby.

The problem with all this popularity? Massive amounts of great open-source code create opportunities for both in-house development teams and malicious actors. The sheer volume of JavaScript-based services means it’s not enough just design apps with security in mind — businesses must actively mitigate emerging threats by obfuscating critical code to frustrate hacker efforts.

Not sure where to start? Here’s what you need to know about the brewing storm of JavaScript attacks and the simplest ways to reduce your total risk.

Organizations can’t afford to leave apps unprotected. Attackers are growing more sophisticated, leveraging targeted malware campaigns and advanced evasion tactics to compromise applications and cause long-term damage. And according to Forbes, even antivirus tools designed to protect devices and software can increase overall risk: recent research found that more than 28 million Android phones were subject to security vulnerabilities thanks to insecure virus protection apps.

As a result, many companies looking to boost application protection and security without breaking their budget or introducing unexpected risk are considering in-house builds of better defenses using a combination of IT talent and publicly available tools.

The challenge? Homegrown solutions introduce the potential for DIY disasters. Let’s dig in and discover why they can’t measure up.

Earlier this month, I had come across Scott Hanselman’s excellent blog post, What's better than ILDasm? ILSpy and dnSpy are tools to Decompile .NET Code where he had shared his insights on the strengths and limitations of a laundry list of reverse engineering and debugging tools. In the comments that followed, someone had asked for an obfuscation recommendation for those times when a developer wants to protect their code against reverse-engineering (a reasonable question to be sure).

Unfortunately, comments had been disabled by that point, and so I had sent an email to Scott that mapped Dotfuscator’s anti reverse-engineering/tamper/debugging capabilities to the collection of developer tools that he had covered.