Nearly every business organization has a website or several websites which they use to offer their services as well as interact with their customers. Websites are beneficial since they enable a company to offer its services twenty-four hours, seven days a week.
Such web-based services normally involve the exchange of a lot of sensitive information and money transactions. Despite all the benefits that web-based applications offer to a business, hackers and other cybercrime attackers are always plotting how they can penetrate the security of the website applications for various reasons.
As a result, web application security is a must for any business that wishes to protect itself from attackers and also to minimize the threats and vulnerabilities they face online.
Web application security refers to the means and processes of protecting online services and web-based applications from vulnerabilities and threats usually present in the applications’ codes.
Common risks to web application
One of the major web application risks to most online businesses is code injection. Cybercriminals inject malicious code in web traffic which executes once it reaches the endpoint. Broken authentication further poses risks during the management of interactive sessions, which may lead to the compromise of user identities.
Another notable risk is Cross-site scripting (XSS), which is a very common web application risk nowadays. It shares many similarities with code injection but hackers use scripts rather than codes.
Other risks include security misconfigurations, unvalidated redirects, objects that are directly referenced and they are insecure, access control malfunction, and many others.
Challenges online businesses face against cyber security
Online businesses face an array of challenges while protecting themselves. The most common challenges comprise of payment methods and reliability. Online businesses have an uphill task of convincing their clients that they can safely use credit cards without compromising their security.
Attackers, on the other hand, are continually deriving efficient methods of carrying out attacks and infecting web applications with malware and viruses undetected. Online businesses further have challenges in ensuring online transaction’s privacy are not compromised.