What is Web Application Security?

As cyber attacks are constantly infiltrating the vulnerabilities in web apps, it is high time for business owners to prioritize security, right from the development stage. To give you a perspective, there is a 442% rise in the vishing operations recorded between the 1st and 2nd half of 2024. Not just that, but the fastest ever eCrime breakout time was recorded at 51 seconds. 

Now that’s something that business owners need to worry about and act upon! With web application security in place, you will be practicing the approach towards protecting APIs, applications, and websites from all forms of cyberattacks. It is not a single discipline, but has a lot of sub-branches. The idea is to protect businesses from data theft, cyber vandalism, unethical competition, or other such issues. 

Internet, having a global exposure, puts web applications at risk of experiencing attacks from diverse locations and at various complexities and levels. Therefore, web app security has now been prioritized, and a wide variety of crucial strategies are made part of the entire development timeline. Read this article till the end to learn more about web application security. 

Importance of Web Application Security

Today, the entire world runs on web apps, from remote work applications and online banking to e-commerce and entertainment. Therefore, web applications are now a primary target for cyber attackers who are in search of vulnerabilities to exploit. 

For instance, the design flaws, API weaknesses, open-source code, poor access control, and third-party widgets are all loopholes for attackers to exploit. Cybercrimes can lead companies to bear costs towards lost value, irrespective of the industry. Beyond data theft and financial loss, web application attacks can adversely hamper customer goodwill, business reputation, and assets. 

Thus, web app security is paramount in 2025 and beyond! 

What are the Common Web Application Security Risks?

There are several types of attacks that a web application might incur, depending on the goal of attackers and the potential security gaps. Some of the common ones include:

1. Zero-Day Vulnerability

It is a specific type of vulnerability of an organizational loophole that is mostly unknown to the makers of the web application. Therefore, developers often lack the right fix to this problem! These vulnerabilities are often unknown security flaws within the firmware, hardware, or software, making the web app exploitable. Attackers often follow up their exploitation by evading any possible protection measures put up by the vendors. 

2. SQL Injection

SQL injection is more of an attacking method where the hacker exploits the potential vulnerabilities to gain access to unauthorized information. They can create or modify user permissions, or can also destroy and manipulate sensitive data. 

3. DoS and DDoS Attacks

Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) an attack approaches executed through diverse vectors. The cyber attackers will be overloading a specific service and the infrastructure that surrounds it. They will use different attack traffic to do the needful! When the server becomes incapable of processing the incoming requests effectively, it denies service to inputs of legitimate users. 

4. Buffer Overflow

It is basically a web app anomaly when the software writes data to any specific space within the memory, called a buffer. Attackers will be overflowing the capacity of the buffer, resulting in data moving to adjacent locations within the memory. Thus, the data will be overwritten across different memory locations, and such behavior can be used for injecting any malicious code. 

5. API Abuse

APIs with vulnerabilities will enable the attackers to inject malicious code into one of the two apps or gain access to the sensitive data when it moves from one application to the other. As the API use increases across web applications, such type of abuse becomes common. 

Beyond these attacks, some of the other common web application security threats include:

• Cookie poisoning
• Cross-site scripting
• Insecure deserialization
• Session hijacking
• Credential stuffing
• Brute force, etc. 

How to Secure Web Applications?

There are various strategies or best practices recommended by experts for web application protection, right from design and development to deployment and maintenance stages:

1. WAF (Web Application Firewall)

The purpose of WAF is to filter out all the traffic that’s suspected to be taking undue advantage of vulnerabilities within the web app. Such firewalls are important because there is a high chance that new vulnerabilities will emerge unpredictably and quickly. 

2.DDoS Mitigation

The DDoS mitigation services are implemented between the public internet and a server through dedicated filtration and a rigorously high-bandwidth capacity. This approach will prevent the malicious traffic surges from overwhelming the web app server. The modern-day DDoS attacks drive a heavy load of malicious traffic to overwhelm the servers. Therefore, such mitigation services become necessary!

3. DNSSEC

It is basically a protocol that ensures that the DNS traffic of a web application is safely routed to the right servers. Thus, the users won’t be intercepted by any on-path cyber attacker. 

4. Bot Management

This strategy makes use of ML (Machine Learning) and other such detection techniques for distinguishing human users from that of automated traffic. Thus, it will prevent the latter from unethically accessing the web application. 

5. ECM (Encryption Certificate Management)

ECM is the approach where a third party will manage all the key elements of your web application associated with TLS/SSL encryption. They will generate the private keys and will also revoke/renew certificates due to potential vulnerabilities. This way, the overall risk of important elements being exposed to private traffic will be reduced. 

6. API Gateways

There must be API gateways implemented in the web applications. It will help you identify the shadowed APIs that were originally overlooked. This way, you can block any known or suspected traffic from targeting the vulnerabilities within the integrated APIs. Such gateways will also help you monitor or manage the API traffic!

7. Attack Surface Management

By using dedicated attack surface management tools, you will be providing a single place for mapping the attack surface, followed by identification and mitigation of the potential security risks. Thus, it will take only a few clicks for your team to secure the web application. 

Let Simpalm Help You Keep Your Web Applications Secure with Proven Methods! 

At Simpalm, we have dedicated tools and robust expertise for securing web applications right from the development stage. We make sure to integrate industry-standard security measures to protect the sensitive customer data and business assets within the web application. Our added ongoing maintenance and support efforts will ensure the vulnerabilities are identified and fixed. 

Our secure web application development services are designed to repel the common cyber threats and keep your site infrastructure protected. If you want to learn more about our service solutions, feel free to connect with our team of experts.