Despite the rising costs and impact of application compromise — recent data found that 58 digital records are stolen every second and breaches cost companies an average of $3.6 million — many best practices and procedures for securely designing, developing, testing and protecting applications are largely ad-hoc. As noted by Tech Republic, in fact, exactly ZERO percent of organizations say their security needs are fully met by their current infosec strategy, down from just 11 percent last year.

Some respondents pointed to a lack of skilled resources while others cited budget constraints, but regardless of origin the outcome is clear: Hastily-designed app protection procedures that don’t meet current needs and can’t keep up with evolving demands.

Need a helping hand with your application protection process? We’ve compiled some of the best practices of leading-edge companies into a top-10 list. Let’s get started.

DashO v9.0 is out, and it has a new major version number for a very good reason: we've made some major improvements!

Java 9 and 10 support, including module support

In DashO v8.4, we introduced "provisional" Java 9 support, and we published an article describing our Java 9 roadmap. Java 9 support was provisional because there were cases where DashO would process a Java 9 app in a way that DashO thought was correct but would actually result in a broken app. As part of our commitment to the "principle of least surprise", we didn't want users to discover those issues by accident, so we made Java 9 support require an opt-in.

As of DashO 9, Java 9 (and 10) support is no longer provisional; it is a fully-supported feature, without an opt-in - and without surprises. There are a few edge cases, still, but those will generate build warnings or errors, as appropriate.

Now is the time to seriously look at how you are protecting and securing your applications

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published two data-security focused documents in as many months.

In June 2018, NIST published guidance on assessing requirements for securing unclassified information (NIST Special Publication 800-171A Assessing Security Requirements for Controlled Unclassified Information).

In July 2018, SPECIAL PUBLICATION 1800-1 Securing Electronic Health Records on Mobile Devices was published offering a practical guide to meeting the specialized security and privacy obligations that come with the management of health records on mobile devices.

JSON is a widely used format for sharing objects and data within an application. To protect .NET applications that serialize and deserialize JSON objects, you should be aware of some special considerations.

Consider a basic Employee class:

All apps are vulnerable. That’s the takeaway from a recent Trustwave report, which found that 100 percent of web applications could be compromised in a cyberattack. Combined with the uptick in mobile malware, account takeover fraud and blockchain-based attacks, companies spend most of their time fending off new attacks while trying to keep current apps up and running.

The result? It’s easy to assume that when applications aren’t directly under attack, they’re effectively safe. The truth? More code handling more data increases the risk of “leaky apps” — applications which unwittingly expose sensitive data to prying eyes.

Here’s how you plug the holes.

Anyone developing software applications today can easily feel overwhelmed by the persistent security threats their products face from application counterfeiting and malware injection to theft of services and confidential information. This article discusses some of ways hackers go about their dirty deeds and how to achieve a balanced perspective on application risk and risk management allowing you to release applications with greater confidence. Gaining this confidence requires a deeper knowledge of the risks and potential remedies.

With our recent DashO releases, we’ve been working to make our Android support even easier to use. A great example of this is our evolved support for Crashlytics, which is an analytics framework that can provide detailed reports on application crashes from the field.

When applications have been obfuscated, the stack traces will contain obfuscated class and method names. To prevent this from complicating debugging, Crashlytics provides a utility to automatically deobfuscate stack traces, so that the reporting server shows the original class and method names. It does so by reading the map file, which is a file created by the obfuscation tool to pair the obfuscated class and method names with the original names. Crashlytics expects this map file to be in a ProGuard-compatible format, which differs from the DashO map file format.

If you were using Crashlytics with a version of DashO prior to our 8.5, this would likely have caused issues. You might have experienced an error during the Gradle build, from the Crashlytics plugin:

Applications are vulnerable. Eighty-six percent of web apps have access control and authentication issues, while 80 percent of mobile apps may unwittingly expose critical vulnerabilities. As noted by Dark Reading, even traditionally “safe” digital environments such as industrial control systems (ICS) are now at risk — more than 50 percent of ICS/SCADA applications available through reputable app stores contain serious authorization flaws.

The result? Companies are looking for new ways to defend web and mobile apps that go beyond standard testing practices and empower real-time response. Enter Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) which is designed to detect app attacks as they happen. Over the last few years, the market for this technology has diversified and evolved; recent data puts the RASP market on track for 50 percent CAGR over the next four years.