Discover why customer data security surpasses company value. Learn essential tips for encryption, safeguarding against login attacks, and adopting proactive security measures to protect your business and customer trust. Click to enhance your data protection strategy.
If your customer's data is compromised, you might as well kiss your company goodbye. Or you know, if you're the Equifax CEO, sell $2M worth of shares before disclosing the data breach.
I'll touch on 2 major vulnerabilities you can address when building your web app / website. I'm certainly no expert in security, but I spent a few years doing backend development for a cloud security startup called Mojave Networks that was later acquired by a Gartner leading security company, Sophos.
Encrypting is "the process of converting information or data into a code, especially to prevent unauthorized access."Let's start by talking about encryption in transit. This is the most common use of encryption and essentially means data is encrypted before being sent over the wire in case someone is sniffing the wire or intercepting packets. Most websites nowadays support HTTPS over port 443, vs HTTP over port 80. The 'S' stands for secure because your web client/browser and the server will negotiate an encryption algorithm and obfuscate all data before sending it. It looks something like this in the browser:
Assuming you can trust the host, by validating the top-level certificate authority for the certificate being presented by the server, you can rest knowing your data is going to the correct person and is encrypted. A relatively uncommon attack is a man-in-the-middle attack (MITM) where a malicious server gets in between a client and the destination and acts as the destination to intercept the data. This is a topic for another day.When should you encrypt?Anytime data is sent over the wire - even on internal networks. As more and more companies are moving their architecture to shared racks they are also inevitably introducing additional vulnerabilities, unless they take proper precautions of course.On shared networks it's possible that an attacker is living on the same internal network as you. By shared networks I mean servers running on shared racks such as AWS, Digital Ocean, Azure, etc..How Should you EncryptEncrypt on the frontend by using a globally trusted certificate authority (CA) to sign a certificate with a common name (CN) that matches your domain.You should force users to use the HTTPS version of your site by redirecting from HTTP. Allowing unencrypted traffic is a big "no no" and can lead to credentials being intercepted if you have login forms. Example:
Encrypt on the backend using mutual auth. This means the data is encrypted in transit, but equally as important, it means the servers know who they are talking to since each server contains a keystore and a truststore, thus preventing a MITM attack that is relaying/altering data.What Should you EncryptUnless you have major constraints that don't allow you to easily encrypt data, it's generally good practice to encrypt all data in transit. You should also get in the habit of encrypt touchy data at rest. "At rest", meaning in storage, in case one of your servers were compromised.
There are two types of login attacks you need to watch out for.
I recently sat in on a tech talk by the CEO of Shape Security and he provided a great tip for security in the form of an analogy. If a bear attacks, you don't need to be the fastest, you just need to be faster than your friend. Security is a game of cat and mouse. As developers put more defenses in place, hackers find new ways to poke holes in systems. By taking these simple steps, you can better hedge yourself against potential hacks.Subscribe to the blog to get more articles like this.Graphics compliments of Freepik
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