A Strategic Approach to Application Vulnerability Assessment

1. A Strategic Approach to Application Vulnerability Assessment Web or mobile application security assessment requires a properly planned approach. Read on to know some of the basic steps in this approach. With more and more businesses occupying online space, the scope for hackers to mess around is getting bigger. Any application you use comes with a risk of data leakage - you won’t even have clue when a small malware posing as a minor flaw or additional plug-in in your app, will gradually extract your private details. Deleting that app may look like a solution, but you can’t really stop using apps out of the fear of cyber attacks. Aiming to combat cyber crime, companies deploying web applications and mobile applications have adopted strategies for securing them as well. A set of procedures known as application vulnerability assessment shows how likely it is for an application to get hacked. All the vulnerabilities found are properly documented - developers and security testing professionals later analyze these vulnerabilities and come up with better security solutions. Vulnerability assessment, as mentioned above, is a group of multiple procedures and one needs to follow a proper approach in order to ensure that each of these procedures is implemented at the right time and in the right manner. Mentioned below are some of the basic steps in this approach: Make a Self Assessment Before you start taking any steps towards protecting your apps, you need to know every single thing about them. Make a thorough assessment of all your web apps and mobile apps to ensure that they work as intended without any speed constraints or other problems.You might be able to find some of the security flaws through application penetration testing during this stage. Clearly Understand Business Processes Each of the apps deployed by your company has a certain purpose related to a business process. It is thus imperative that you understand all the business processes so that it is easier to learn the technicalities of the apps used for these processes. You may also have to review the data that is handled by these business processes and hence is manipulated by apps. This way you will also be able to assign priority to the apps. More than half of the work for securing your apps has to be done at your end. Unless you are sure that everything is fine on your side, it will be hard to eliminate the chances of cyber attacks. Content Source: http://www.avyaan.com/blog/a-strategic-approach-to-application-vulnerability- assessment/