This year will be just as hectic for cybercriminals. Focusing on these areas will help you secure your environments, protect your systems and data, and ensure that your firm is only in the news when you want it to be—in 2023

there are flaws with web applications.

SaaS businesses rely heavily on web apps, which may contain sensitive data such as customer information.

Because of the multi-tenant nature of many SaaS systems, you need to make sure that your code is safe from attacks that could allow one user to access the data of another, such as logic faults, injection problems, or access control issues. These are basic omissions in coding that can be easily exploited by hackers.

By integrating with your current environment, automated vulnerability scanners and regular pentesting can help you design and create safe online apps by spotting vulnerabilities as they are introduced throughout the development cycle.

blunders in configuration

It’s not always easy working on the cloud. It is the responsibility of your CTO and developers to lock down all configurations, user roles, and permissions to ensure they are in line with business policy. Therefore, it might be very challenging to identify configuration errors and correct them manually. Gartner estimates that by 2025, as much as 99 percent of cloud environment failures will be traced back to human error.

A pentest of your cloud architecture can identify issues such as misconfigured S3 buckets, permissive firewalls within VPCs, and overly permissive cloud accounts, while external network monitoring will uncover vulnerabilities and misconfigurations and offer you insight throughout your attack surface.

Using a combination of physical inspection and a technology like Scoutsuite, you can conduct your own audit. By making sure that only the necessary services are available from the internet, a vulnerability scanner like Managex may help you decrease and monitor your attack surface.

Software security flaws and updates

This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s actually a huge problem for every industry. The same holds true for SaaS businesses. When self-hosting an application, it is your responsibility to immediately apply any and all operating system and library security fixes. The fact that flaws in operating systems and libraries’ security are always being discovered and patched means that this is an ongoing process.

Your service should be deployed to a fully patched system with each release, and DevOps and disposable infrastructure can help with this, but you should still keep an eye out for new vulnerabilities in the meantime.

Free and premium Serverless and Platform as a Service (PaaS) services let you host your application in a container and have the service provider handle OS updates on your behalf. Still, it’s on you to make sure the libraries your service relies on have the latest security fixes installed.

Inadequate procedures and standards for maintaining internal security

The security of many rapidly expanding SaaS organisations is often inadequate, but hackers don’t care about size. A password manager, two-factor authentication, and security training are all simple ways to greatly boost your security.

Password managers are simple to setup and inexpensive ways to ensure that everyone on your staff utilises strong, unique passwords for all of your online accounts. Ensure that all members of your team are utilising it, ideally one that isn’t vulnerable to hacking attacks.

When possible, use Authy or another software that allows for two-factor or multi-factor authentication (2FA/MFA). With 2FA, you need both a proper password and a second authentication token. The safest option is a physical security key, while the other two options are time-based One Time Passwords and OTPs texted to mobile devices (least secure). Two-factor authentication (2FA) is not available for all services but should be used whenever possible.

Finally, provide training or at least share instances within the team when you see attempts to make sure your team understands how to maintain good cyber hygiene, including how to recognise and avoid opening phishing URLs.

Conclusion

Cybersecurity is ultimately a balancing act between risk and available resources, and this can be especially challenging for young companies with many conflicting demands. However, you should increase your cyber security spending as your company grows in size, both in terms of staff and financial resources.

There are several professionals who can help you maintain security and identify areas of vulnerability in your systems. One of them is Managex. Find out how we can help you and your company in 2023 by contacting us now.