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APIs have become a strategic necessity for conducting business due to the agility, innovation, and automation they enable. While 90% of the business reaps the benefits of this technology, the security teams are often exposed to a slew of new challenges that can’t be solved by long-standing security tools and strategies. In fact, according to Gartner¹, by 2022, API abuses will be the most frequent attack vector resulting in data breaches for enterprise web applications. We are partnering with the team at SC Magazine to address this phenomenon in an upcoming webinar.

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to discuss the role of machine learning in security with Dave Shackleford from SANS. It was a fun discussion, and if you have the time, I encourage you to check it out here.

It's hard to believe, but the New Year is nearly upon us. 2018 was a busy year for cybersecurity, between regulatory changes and massive data breaches. Security teams were faced with obstacles that had never before been encountered and were forced to adapt. And while the year is coming to a close, the challenges are far from over. With new vulnerabilities arising from IoT-enabled innovations, an increase in sophisticated attacks due to bots leveraging AI, and the potential for a catastrophic breach in an established sector like utilities, 2019 is shaping up to be a challenging year on the cybersecurity front.

In this series of blog posts, we have been analyzing the major forces that are reshaping the way the industry approaches application security.In this post, we lay out the foundations for a new approach to security that not only solves the problems of the old approach to web application firewalls (WAFs), but also addresses the new challenges posed by the changing application and threat landscapes. In case you missed any of the previous sections, you can check them out here:

Historically, there has been no love lost between software developers and security teams. Dev teams are frustrated by the restrictive nature of the security standards placed on them as they often hinder rapid application development. On the flip side, security teams see developers as one of the top threats to the integrity and success of their security strategy.

In this series of articles, we’ve been exploring the various ways that application security is evolving and what it means for modern security teams. In the first article, we analyzed how virtually all applications have evolved to be web-facing in some manner and how this has massively multiplied the AppSec attack surface for most organizations. Next, we addressed the applications themselves and how the evolution of DevOps and new microservice architectures have created new opportunities, as well as new challenges, for security. In this article, we shift our focus to the threats themselves. Here, we will take a look at the many types of threats facing modern applications, some of the challenges they pose to the traditional web application firewall (WAF) model, and how security can evolve moving forward.

While application security has never been more advanced, one could argue that it has also never been more difficult. Keeping pace with the growth and evolution of applications, evaluating the endless number of available solutions, and recruiting the expertise to manage the solutions and evaluate the data are just a few of the challenges modern security teams face. The team at ThreatX is comprised of engineers, developers, and security practitioners that have faced one of more of these challenges in their careers. That's what fuels our passion every day.

On this note, I am writing a multi-article series that addresses some of the key trends and challenges facing application security today and how security teams can adapt. In the first article, I highlight the shift in application development and integration, and the impact on security teams. In this article, I will dive into how new DevOps models are affecting security strategies and ushering in a new age of security tools. 

The Modern Age of Applications

Applications are the heart of most organizations. While you can think of data as the nouns of an organization’s story, applications are the verbs where the action takes place and the real work gets done. And the nature of those applications is changing dramatically - including everything from how they are developed, to how they are accessed, to how they are secured.