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Mobile apps are awash with unremediated security vulnerabilities

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Organizations that are all-in leveraging microservices to speed-up application development, on the DevOps side of the house, have begun acknowledging the importance of incorporating SecOps along the way. The most forward-thinking among them are increasingly checking for vulnerabilities in new apps – and finding them, big time.

That’s one of the key revelations in the 2019 WhiteHat Application Security Statistics Report, which I’d place in the category of reports that bear close scrutiny because it is based on the actual in-the-field experiences of WhiteHat’s global customer base. Also, WhiteHat has been generating this report annually since 2006.

Based on 17 million application security scans carried out in 2018, WhiteHat found a 20% increase in vulnerabilities found in the applications that organizations tested for security flaws.

What’s more, based on WhiteHat’s partner, NowSecure’s insight, some 70% of mobile apps were found to leak sensitive data.

The fact that more companies are participating in the hunt for security flaws in new apps is a good thing. However, WhiteHat also found many app vulnerabilities are, today, going unaddressed. Remediation rates actually fell in 2018, as compared to 2017. At the moment, the effort required to secure existing and new apps appears to be overwhelming already short-staffed security teams.

The Dawn of DevSecOps

This field report tells us that, yes, SecOps is gaining traction, with more and more security teams beginning to contribute to the delivery of secure apps. However, many security teams lack the skills, and/or have not yet won corporate backing to bring in the engineering support needed to mitigate the vulnerabilities.

These applications flaws were always there, mind you – WhiteHat found that more than one-third of all application security risks are inherited rather than written – but now they are being flushed out as DevOps and SecOps merge into DevSecOps.

The more progressive security teams are, indeed, tackling remediation. For those teams, the benefits associated with paying a bit of attention to security, up front, have sunk in. Not only can they take pride in contributing to a better experience for end users, they’re also reducing the headaches that go along with having to patch vulnerabilities that turn up, post production.

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James Barnley

I’m the editor of the DomainingAfrica. I write about internet and social media, focusing mainly on Domains. As a subscriber to my newsletter, you’ll get a lot of information on Domain Issues, ICANN, new gtld’s, Mobile technology and social media.

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