Computing and information technologies are dynamic, and for the continually emerging and emerging cyber threats, prevention is paramount in the corporate world and developmental processes. On this note, one vital asset that has received recognition globally is the OWASP Top 10. The following is a list of owasp top 10 2013, which provides readers with the most significant security threats to web applications at the moment. Studying these risks will help organizations to improve the security situation and prevent the theft of their information assets.
- Prioritize Your Security Efforts
What’s most important: the OWASP Top 10 is quite an orderly guide on where to focus your protection measures. Thus, you will know where to direct your efforts first – to the threats that are the most dangerous and need to be met. This way, you can make quite a change to the overall protection of your app without understating the sheer amount of things that could be done wrong.
- Stay Current with Emerging Threats
This is perhaps one of the few fields that are characterized by inevitable evolution with the ever introducing new threats. The OWASP Top 10 stands and changes quite often due to emergence of fresh and more severe threats. This way you will always be in harmony with the new versions and the security precautions you are using would be efficient against the new threats. It is a preventive action, which allows you to avoid the attackers, and reduces your risks, associated with new threats.
- Improve Your Development Practices
It is therefore crucial to incorporate the OWASP Top 10 as a guide in enhancing your development process thus increase your coding standards. This way, you inform your development team on such general known weaknesses and therefore, promote secure programming right from concept stage of an application. It tends to identify and fix possible security flaws during the development phase thus making the process less costly and time consuming than if the flaws were forward to the production phase.
- Enhance Your Reputation
The massive use of computers and the internet in the latter, as well as employee carelessness in the former, causes significant problems for a company’s image in case of a data leak or security violation. When implementing an application or service by addressing the OWASP Top 10, you show the client and their users that you or the company takes security seriously. Such a measure can create a favorable image for your business among the customers and partners while some of your competitors may not take the security as seriously as that.
- Meet Compliance Requirements
There are various industry standards and regulations through which organizations are mandated to put in place sound security features. As it can be observed, most of these requirements are well covered by the OWASP Top 10, which makes it easy to get there and achieve the goal. If you address these, you can normally tackle a number of compliances at once, which helps to make the process simpler as well as guarantee that the requisite security level is attained in your business.
- Reduce the Risk of Data Breaches
Losses can be incurred in terms of money, time, and reputation of the company, the legal implications resulting from a data breach are also severe. These are some of the most encountered deficiencies which are included in the list of the OWASP Top 10 and therefore become the most exposed to various attacks. Therefore, by paying attention to these areas, you will be in a better position to minimize the chances of being on the receiving end of a data breach thus shielding your information from access by unwanted persons.
- Foster a Security-Aware Culture
All the guidelines mentioned in the OWASP Top 10 should be done in order to develop a security culture in the organization. Based on the outcome of this study, it can be argued that improving the members of a team’s awareness of such commonly identified deficits would enable them to evaluate the extent and impact of potential security risks in their professional work better. This leads to enhanced security at the developmental phase and the other elevated phases of an organization.
- Facilitate Security Testing and Audits
The OWASP Top 10 gives a clear guideline of how security should done during testing and audits. From this list, you can identify the testing areas that should take top priority and should therefore be given adequate attention. This approach of conducting assessments is also advantageous in ensuring that you are optimized in execution of your security assessments and facilitating presentations of findings and intentions for instant comprehension. Furthermore, there are also many tools and services that aim to find such particular weaknesses thus it is easier to incorporate automated testing into the cycle.
- Improve Incident Response Preparedness
OWASP top 10 is a tool to aid your web application security; a good understanding of the same advanced your ability when it comes to responding to incidents. Well, knowing these common issues would enable you to know the areas of weaknesses and then be ready to handle any security breaches in good time. Such understanding can enable you come up with effective methodologies to prevent the incidents or even enable your practitioners to respond to security breaches in more appropriate ways.
- Cost-Effective Security Improvement
The following check list of OWASP 2013 provide a lower-cost security approach to adopt for applications’ security. This is the reason, by targeting these critical areas you may be able secure your organization’s resources to a great extent while not necessarily having to spend some huge amounts on enhanced security or even scrap your existing security systems. This focused strategy enables you to get high value for your security investments and show measurable results to your business while incurring minor organizational interferences.
Conclusion
To sum it up, the OWASP Top 10 is a useful top-priority list for the development of organizations’ application security. Finding and fixing these critical threats can lower your levels of risk and create more reliable and more protected applications. When adopting these security solutions, it is wise to use tools such as Appsealing to improve the application’s security levels. It is also duly noted that Appsealing also has measures against other threats that can help you out to secure the application from the threats listed in the OWASP Top 10.
