The beauty of programming languages is that any employee who knows how to code in a notable language can build a business for almost any application they can dream up. For a long time, that is exactly what most businesses did. There are millions of custom applications out there, built by developers over the last decade or two, using a wide range of different programming languages.
One thing many applications have in common is that they were not securely coded.
Most businesses have several different ones that they once had custom-built for them or third-party applications. They may have invested a significant budget and rely on these apps to run their business, but the people who built these legacy applications have probably moved on to another job. Now, these critical applications run in production, unsupported by their creators, and nobody is quite sure how to update the code. Updates would make the application more efficient and secure, but businesses still use them because more often than not, the applications are doing what they are supposed to.
Some of these vulnerable applications are what we would call high-value applications, meaning they run some sort of critical system. Others may be low-value applications kept around for their usefulness. What they have in common is that they might not pass a regulatory cybersecurity compliance audit, because they were built in a time when programmers cared little about security and knew even less about DevSecOps.
Over the last two or three decades, businesses produced more custom applications than anyone has ever seen, but they also produced the most vulnerable, most insecure code the world has ever seen. Today’s cybersecurity threat landscape has never been more vibrant and fast-moving, and legacy web applications are low-hanging fruit for cybercriminals or hacktivists, especially if that application is connected to the internet in some way. Hackers use automated scanners to find insecure web applications with known security vulnerabilities that they can use to exploit and then attack the application owner or steal their data.
Imagine you are the new CISO who starts work at a large company - the first CISO they have ever employed. Two weeks in, it dawns on you that the company has ten business critical applications running in their environments, all of which contain known vulnerabilities and are connected to the internet .
An independent penetration tester confirms that they are indeed extremely insecure and that some of them definitely break the cybersecurity compliance requirements governing your industry. Even worse, some of the highest-value applications have the most severe vulnerabilities, putting the business at risk.
You have two options to deal with this problem. One, you can spend an enormous amount of time and money hiring programmers who know old programming languages. They’ll be hired to securely rebuild the legacy app codebases in a modern language using DevSecOps to ensure security comes first at every step.
The second option is to use CyGuard Web Application Shielding, a fully managed web application security service. With CyGuard Web Application Shielding , you immediately mitigate the vulnerabilities in applications and secure them against modern cyber attackers without changing one line of code. It quickly fixes your security-flawed web applications by eliminating known exploits and vulnerabilities by simply injecting a protective shield in front of the vulnerable application to fully remediate or neutralize the attack. No need to spend money and time retooling vulnerable applications or hiring outside programming resources.
Web Application Shielding can quickly mitigate against the web application vulnerabilities identified in your business’s risk register. Our team corrects insecure behavior with customized code objects and shields that we place in front of your applications. The end result is effective security coverage over those vulnerabilities so that they cannot be exploited.
Learn more about how CyGuard Web Application Shielding can fix vulnerabilities in your web apps without touching a single line of code.