What is Web Application Security?
Web application security (also known as Web AppSec) is the idea of building websites to function as expected, even when they are under attack. The concept involves a collection of security controls engineered into a Web application to protect its assets from potentially malicious agents. Web applications, like all software, inevitably contain defects. Some of these defects constitute actual vulnerabilities that can be exploited, introducing risks to organizations. Web application security defends against such defects. It involves leveraging secure development practices and implementing security measures throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC), ensuring that design-level flaws and implementation-level bugs are addressed.
Web application security refers to a variety of processes, technologies, or methods for protecting web servers, web applications, and web services such as APIs from attack by Internet-based threats. Web application security is crucial to protecting data, customers, and organizations from data theft, interruptions in business continuity, or other harmful results of cybercrime.
By most estimates, more than three-quarters of all cybercrime targets applications and their vulnerabilities. Web application security products and policies strive to protect applications through measures such as web application firewalls (WAFs), multi-factor authentication (MFA) for users, the use, protection, and validation of cookies to maintain user state and privacy status, and various methods for validating user input to ensure it is not malicious before that input is processed by an application.
Web application security is important because, the world today runs on apps, from online banking and remote work apps to personal entertainment delivery and e-commerce. It’s no wonder that applications are a primary target for attackers, who exploit vulnerabilities such as design flaws as well as weaknesses in APIs, open-source code, third-party widgets, and access control.
Common attacks against web applications include:
Brute force
Credential stuffing
SQL injection and formjacking injections
Cross-site scripting
Cookie poisoning
Man-in-the-middle (MITM) and man-in-the-browser attacks
Sensitive data disclosure
Insecure deserialization
Session hijacking
