Which Application Testing is Right for Your Organization?

Millions of people worldwide bank, shop, buy airline tickets, and perform research using the World Wide Web. Each transaction usually includes sharing private information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, and passwords. They’re routinely transferred and stored in a variety of locations. Billions of dollars and millions of personal identities are at stake every day. In the past, security professionals thought firewalls, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), patching, and privacy policies were enough to protect websites from hackers. Today, we know better.

Whatever your industry — you should have a consistent testing schedule completed by a security team. Scalable technology allows them to quickly and effectively identify your critical vulnerabilities and their root causes in nearly any type of system, application, device or implementation.

At MSI, our reporting presents clear, concise, action-oriented mitigation strategies that allows your organization to address the identified risks at the technical, management and executive levels.

There are several ways to strengthen your security posture. These strategies can help: application scanning, application security assessments, application penetration testing, and risk assessments.

Application scanning can provide an excellent and affordable way for organizations to meet the requirements of due diligence; especially for secondary, internal, well-controlled or non-critical applications.

Application security assessments can identify security problems, catalog their exposures, measure risk, and develop mitigation strategies that strengthen your applications for your customers. This is a more complete solution than a scan since it goes deeper into the architecture.

Application penetration testing uses tools and scripts to mine your systems for data and examine underlying session management and cryptography. Risk assessments include all policies and processes associated with the specific application, and will be reviewed depending on the complexity of your organization.

In order to protect your organization against security breaches (which are only increasing in frequency), consider conducting an application scan, application  assessment, application penetration test, or risk assessment on a regular basis. If you need help deciding which choice is best for you, let us know. We’re here to help!

Smartphones and Banking Applications

Mobile banking users are predicted to reach 400 million by 2013, according to a study by Juniper Research.

The report author, Howard Wilcox, says that transactional or “push” mobile banking is being offered increasingly by banks via downloadable applications or the mobile web, complementing existing SMS messaging services for balance and simple information enquiries.

“For the user it’s about three things: convenience, convenience and convenience,” Mr. Wilcox said. “The mobile device is almost always with you, and if you organize your life with your mobile, then why not your finances too?

“For example, people can receive account alerts and reminders straight away and take action immediately if necessary – say to top up an account or pay a bill,” he said. “With apps, the whole process is made so much simpler too.”

We know consumers want to make their lives easier — and using applications on their mobile phones seems to promise that, but how can you secure those applications?
Here are some of the steps you can take to start making your mobile applications secure:

  • Security controls: One of the main issues with smartphone applications is access control. These apps are usually used in the most vulnerable locations: public settings such as airports, restaurants, and lobbies. All mobile devices must have a protective mechanism that allows it to be accessed by authorized persons only. A few ways to monitor control would be: install anti-virus software, file encryption, session encryption, device registration, and password complexity rules.
  • User authentication: Access privileges are limited to those who use the smartphone device. Personal identification numbers are generally an acceptable means of authentication because they reside on the device only and are never transmitted.
  • Data Encryption: A powerful defense tool, encryption prevents anyone but the most savvy attacker to access important information. Ensure that the process is automatic and transparent to the user and protects all stored data. Systems that require user involvement to encrypt specific files in specific places cannot provide the “provable” security regime needed by organizations. Encryption is effective only if authorized people control the decryption key, so there needs to be a connection between encryption and user authentication. Access control, user authentication and encryption are the three elements that comprise virtual physical-access control.
  • Security administration: This needs to be in place for customers who have questions or need help. Policy enforcement, deployment, updates, help desk, key recovery and system logging are all vital components of an enterprise system that provides “provable” security to comply with data privacy regulations and to repel litigation.

Many phones use RSA encryption for authentication. While most of the big antivirus vendors provide security solutions for smartphones, few have the “silver bullet” for all platforms. As device manufacturers continue to add processing power and storage capacity; and platform vendors provide more applications for generating and consuming data, security will become a greater concern as attackers look upon it as their new playground.

New Tools Keep Coming

Several new and updated tools have been released recently. These are mostly aimed at application scanning, specifically getting into the backend database. While it’s no surprise that these tools keep coming, we just want to reinforce the need for better application security. We don’t anticipate an end to attacker tools anytime soon, so keep your guards up 😉