The cybersecurity world has changed. Thanks to spreading risk of cyber attacks, malware, ransomware, and the intensifying pressure of new cybersecurity regulations and sky-high penalties for leaks and breaches, robust Application Security (AppSec) is non-negotiable.

In this blog, you’ll learn how you can meet these challenges head on, and secure your operations and systems by focusing on the most fundamental aspects of your security posture. I’ll walk you through AppSec and its benefits, examine how organizations should approach AppSec design and implementation, and give you some advice and AppSec best practices from our team to help with securing your operations.

What is AppSec?

Application security (or AppSec, for short) is a broad term that refers to all of the tools, actions, and processes that an organization uses to protect its applications against vulnerabilities across the entirety of their life cycles. Application security has one objective: to find weaknesses in your applications and systems that could be abused by malicious actors to gain unauthorized access, misuse the application, or make harmful modifications, and fix them before they become a problem.

AppSec is not one single tool or technology or action. Rather, the concept covers a wide swathe of software engineering activities from development to deployment that improve an application’s overall security posture.

What are the benefits of Application Security?

Good AppSec brings a number of benefits to the organizations that use it, including more secure systems and applications, greater user trust, fewer fines and cyberincidents, and uninterrupted regulatory compliance.

In general, AppSec plays a vital role in: 

• Ensuring that code is authentic and remains free of harmful modifications
• Reducing the CVE footprint of your applications
• Protecting sensitive data
• Blocking unauthorized access to applications, systems, or databases
• Stopping malicious actors, malware, data leaks, and other cyber incidents
• Ensuring regulatory compliance
• Minimizing business disruption 
• Preventing security breaches and cyber incidents
• Avoiding financial, reputational, and brand damages from cyber incidents

Top 9 best practices for Application Security

As AppSec is a broad, organization-wide practice that touches on every part of the development lifecycle, it’s important to ensure your AppSec efforts include every stage, layer, process, and tool in your organizational pipeline. 

To this end, you should be looking to make positive changes across both your organization and your tech stack. This means you should be improving security in your software, hardware, internal and external networks, and all your infrastructure, as well as assessing and improving your design processes, internal processes, communications pipelines, and organizational structures.

From my experience, I can recommend nine areas that you should focus on in order to create a robust and reliable AppSec strategy. 

1) It all starts in design and conceptualization

Security starts long before a single line of code is written. The vast majority of pitfalls in application security can be avoided with proper review of your chosen technologies and architecture, a thorough vulnerability assessment, and risk analysis. 

You want to ensure that you’re making solid, sustainable decisions that will support your cybersecurity efforts in the long term. For example, Ubuntu is an extremely popular choice of platform for developers not just because it’s open source, but because it offers a stable, supported, and reliable foundation for meeting the inevitable challenges that arise as software grows and becomes more complex. You should treat your security design philosophy in the same way: pick something you can depend on as a ladder to future success.

2) Uncover your most likely risks and exposures

Good AppSec goes hand in hand with vulnerability management (you can learn about vulnerability management in a blog we recently published) and vulnerability assessment (which we also recently covered in a blog on our website). You should conduct an extensive and deep review of your chosen architecture and planned application design, specifically with the goal of answering the question: “where are the most likely pathways and areas that malicious actors could use to mount an attack?”

Managing your vulnerabilities is a careful dance of threat severity, resource management, and risk probability. Start with the most likely and severe threats, and build from there according to your overall risk appetite.

This process will help you to triage and address your most likely and important vulnerabilities, while opening up a clearer roadmap to improve your overall application security posture.

I also strongly advise that you think outside of the systems-hardening box. Remember that AppSec is holistic; you also want to closely examine cybersecurity risks that lie outside of the traditional landscape of software, hardware, and networks. This could be anything from how you hire and vet employees, to how you manage access to the building, to how your internal communications happen, both inside and outside of the workplace.

3) Revisit and refine your cybersecurity fundamentals

Great AppSec relies on the fundamentals in your application design and cybersecurity controls. The best steps to double down on your cybersecurity in order to create robust AppSec are:

• Implement a Zero Trust Strategy wherever possible
• Ensure that your authentication, authorization, and access control are fully secure (and that you have control over your credentials)
• Use Secure by Default configurations
• Minimize your attack surface – if your device or organization isn’t actively using it a port, component, package, etc,  then disable it by default until it’s needed
• Ensure proper use of cryptography to guarantee that data is protected at rest and in transfer
• Encrypt all sensitive data, and avoid plaintext or cleartext data
• Validate all input and handle all exceptions
• Minimize the access permissions of apps and systems, and design your baseline to stop server-side request forgery from Day Zero
• Institute regular developer training and upskilling in security essentials, so that everyone building your apps and systems is aware of common vulnerabilities and can avoid them

There are many ways you can approach and deliver these security fundamentals, but whichever route you choose your focus should be on building a multilayered defense against attacks across multiple attack vectors. If you’re looking for a guide to what that looks like, I highly recommend reading our latest white paper on building in-depth, multilayered security.

4) Consider your software supply chain 

Of course, you need to ensure that the components you are using are safe to deploy and use, and that they remain maintained for as long as you’re using them.

Think carefully about the sources of your packages and components, their dependencies, and the security mandates they have for patches and security updates. If a single dependency is critically exploitable, you’re putting yourself and your reputation at risk. 

Beyond consuming your components and packages from trusted sources who deliver reliable security patches, you should also have some sort of scanning process in place to ensure that you’re not using known-vulnerable libraries.

5) Rigorous and continuous testing

It should go without saying, but rigorous testing of your applications and systems before go-live is not negotiable. New cybersecurity regulations have tightened the loopholes of the rush-an-MVP-to-market “move fast and break things” practices of yesteryear. 

You need to ensure that your software, systems, and products are operating as expected, even in unexpected circumstances and environments.

6) Frequent audits and external testing

This follows on from the point above, but it’s not enough to just test your apps yourself and think you’re covered. All organizations have blind spots, biases, or priorities that compete with rigorous testing, and the only way to know if they are secure (rather than think you’re secure) is to get independent confirmation of that fact. 

And that confirmation comes in the form of independent organizations who can security test your applications and systems. This can take the form of Penetration Testing, validation tests, or compliance assessment, depending on your product and market needs. There are countless organisations who offer penetration testing, security testing, and more, so make sure to pick one that has been accredited to do this work properly (for example, CREST-approved organizations).

7) Long-term monitoring

Another vital step is to implement long-term monitoring and detection of cyber incidents during the operation of the app or system. This doesn’t just let you know when, and how, something went wrong. It’ll also help you to assess the extent of breaches or cyberincidents, and help you to repair and secure affected systems post-event. 

Long-term monitoring is key to assessing the effectiveness of your AppSec efforts. Without continuous monitoring and testing, you will be unable to adapt to the constantly changing threats and new vulnerabilities that are discovered on a daily basis.  

The follow-up to long-term and continuous monitoring is to have a robust security reporting workflow and incident response process for both internal and external reports. Anyone running an app needs to have a well-documented and well-tested mechanism for users and third parties to be able to report potential vulnerabilities, and for the organization to be able to respond and address them. Finally, your organization needs to have tested playbooks for incident response in the event that something does go wrong.

8) Don’t reinvent the wheel

Every organization needs a security team, but that doesn’t mean you have to build everything yourself from scratch. There are a great number of automated tools, dedicated platforms, specialized applications, and service providers who can roll out everything you need for a secure baseline – whether it’s hands-free patching, around-the-clock monitoring and event alerts, or automated DAST/SAST tools that allow you to test your products extensively. 

Take Ubuntu Pro as an example. It takes much of the manual busywork and admin out of ongoing vulnerability management, by opening up restartless and automated patching, and access to a library of over 36,000 trusted packages for the most common toolchains and applications. By using it, you take care of patching efforts for your OS and apps – no taxing,  manual management needed.

9) Work with experts with a clear track record of security

The best part about AppSec is that it’s a well-established field with plenty of resources to pull from. Take OWASP, for example: a volunteer-driven initiative that provides a treasure trove of extremely valuable cybersecurity resources to everyone who needs them.

If you lack expertise, time, or resources to implement the baselines on your own, the AppSec landscape is filled with time-tested cybersecurity frameworks and controls, coordinated vulnerability platforms, trustworthy third-party security providers, industry benchmarks, and reliable long term support. For 20 years, Canonical has built and maintained Ubuntu and a wide range of some of the most popular and trusted open source applications and services in the developer community. When you use Canonical’s products, you’re not just drawing on 20 years’ worth of software development, but 20 years of security lessons applied across our product suite.

In conclusion, AppSec’s holistic approach shares the increasingly popular cybersecurity philosophy that security is in everything we do and everyone’s responsibility. With growing threats, brand new vulnerabilities, unforeseen attack vectors, and a rising tide of cybersecurity regulation across the world – not to mention the staggering penalties that go with them – good AppSec is a non-negotiable. Now more than ever, you should be examining your processes, designing around a refined set of cybersecurity foundational principles, and consuming packages from a trusted software supply chain. 

Learn more about how you can take the manual effort and time out of much of your Application Security strategy by visiting ubuntu.com/pro

Read more

• https://ubuntu.com/engage/secure-your-stack-with-ubuntu
• Canonical announces Ubuntu Security Research Alliance Program
• What’s new in security for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS?
• How Canonical enables PCI-DSS compliance
• Is Linux secure?