ThreatX - Blog

Just a few weeks ago, my colleague wrote a blog about the importance of having AppSec vendors who are true partners and not simply hawkers of products. This has become even more important as security teams try to adapt to the challenges and pressures introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many organizations are accelerating their migration to cloud-based applications both to reduce costs and to simplify the availability of applications as more users work from home. At the same time, budgets are increasingly uncertain as teams look to control costs in the face of uncertainty. For AppSec teams, this creates a classic need to “do more with less”. While many organizations are being asked to cut back, it is important to remember that attackers are doing just the opposite.

This sort of challenge accentuates the vision behind our approach at ThreatX. This is not a marketing shift to capitalize on a global tragedy, it’s how we built our business from the start. Our approach is simple:

As the threat landscape has become more diverse, AppSec solutions have become increasingly fractured. For each new type of threat or problem, a new corresponding type of security product seems to arise. However, this sort of technology sprawl has become operationally unsustainable as organizations are forced to support exponentially more applications, more APIs, and defend against a much broader set of threats including bots, DDoS attacks, and patient, multi-stage, targeted attacks and evasion techniques. 

It’s been a few weeks since we closed the book on another RSA conference. And as always, it was nice to catch up with old friends, meet new ones, and talk to many of the security professionals who are on the frontlines of AppSec every day.

However, after spending some time on the show floor, one thing really stood out for me: vendors were selling security products, and most attendees were looking for security partnerships.

Every vendor seemingly has a promise for why their technology, products, or features are better than their competitors. But ultimately, it falls to the customers to take a leap of faith, invest in a product, staff the product, and make it deliver on its promises. It is the customer that must do the heavy lifting and take on the risk.

OWASP recently released the first iteration of the API Security Top 10. Like the ubiquitous OWASP Top 10, the API Security Top 10 delivers a prioritized list of the most critical application security issues with a focus on the API side of applications. This is a critical new tool for AppSec teams that hones in on one of the fastest growing, yet chronically under-addressed aspects of security. In this blog, I’d like to offer you an overview of the API top 10 with comparisons to the OWASP top 10 for web applications.

I joined ThreatX’s SOC as the Director of Security about 30 days ago now, and as with any SOC, days are hectic.  In some cases, nights are too. Even so, one of my first objectives at ThreatX was to meet with a few current customers to gather feedback from them about what is working, and what isn’t. 

As the demands of both modern applications and complex threat landscapes have continued to increase, many organizations have been forced to adopt an ever-growing list of new, specialized security tools in an attempt to keep pace. This often includes a mixture of WAFs, anti-bot tools, DDoS prevention, behavioral and analytics tools, intelligence feeds, and more. However, a fractured approach to security is rarely effective and almost never efficient. 

On August 7 and 8 in Las Vegas, thousands of cybersecurity enthusiasts, practitioners and executives will be in attendance at Black Hat 2019. We are thrilled to be among the participants at this year's event.

Just when you think you are one step ahead of hackers, they prove you wrong and set you four steps back. Hackers continue to find new and more devious ways of finding web app vulnerabilities and exploiting them. One such tactic is leveraging malicious bots and automation, which has grown in frequency, volume, and complexity. In fact, nearly 20% of all web traffic comes from malicious bots.*

In the previous post, I outlined a number of malicious automation attacks that we often see targeted against web applications and identified which industries and business types are most commonly attacked. In 2019 alone, we have seen each one of these attacks attempted on one or more of our customers. In this post, I'll share a case study for each attack type and include preventative mitigation techniques (in order of importance) to help avoid future attacks.