The reasons for this gap are multifaceted, says Jeremiah Grossman, founder and CTO of WhiteHat Security, provider of a continuous vulnerability assessment and management service for thousands of Web sites, including the Web sites of dozens of Fortune 500 companies. First, he says, many security professionals have a blind spot for software.
“Most of the security guys out there are not software people,” he says. “They come from an IT background. All they really know how to do is protect the network.”
Second, regulatory compliance and the cruft that comes with regulations based on past threats also play a role in Grossman’s view.
“Organizations must comply,” he says. “They spend the lion’s share of their budget first on firewalls and antivirus because the compliance regulators mandate it.”
It is often difficult for the organization to prioritize application security over revenue-generating development work, he says. Even when organizations identify serious vulnerabilities in their Web sites, it’s not necessarily a simple decision to fix them.
“The organization has to fix it themselves,” he says. “The business has to decide: ‘Do we create revenue-generating features this week? If we don’t deliver those features on time or at all, we will for a fact lose money. Not fixing the vulnerability may potentially cost the business money.’ They have to make a decision.”
Even with these challenges, Grossman says the application security landscape shows signs of improvement. While 2011 was dubbed the Year of the Breach-based on a multitude of high-profile breaches of companies like RSA, Sony, Facebook and Citigroup, not to mention the CIA and FBI-2011 was also a year in which the average number of serious vulnerabilities in Web sites showed a marked decline.
For 12 years, WhiteHat has put together its WhiteHat Security Website Security Statistics Report based on the vulnerabilities it finds in the Web sites it assesses. The 2011 installment, based on the examination of critical vulnerabilities from 7,000 Web sites across major vertical markets, found an average of 79 serious vulnerabilities per Web site, a drastic reduction from the average of 230 it found in 2010 and 1,111 it found in 2007.
“These are real-world Web sites,” Grossman says. “I would guarantee that you have accounts and data in many of the sites we test.”
Of course, that single statistic doesn’t tell the whole story. While the average came in at 79 serious vulnerabilities, the standard deviation was 670: Some Web sites expose a lot more vulnerabilities than others. Also, according to Netcraft, there are roughly 700 million Web sites on the Internet and tens of millions more are coming online each month. While it’s a large sample, 7,000 Web sites is just a tiny fraction of the whole.
Still, WhiteHat’s findings paint a picture of the state of Web site security today; a picture in which Web site security is slowly improving. The banking vertical continued to show its dedication to security: Banking Web sites again possessed the fewest serious vulnerabilities of any industry with an average of 17 serious vulnerabilities per Web site. Banking also had the highest remediation rate of any industry at 74 percent. Every industry, with the notable exceptions of healthcare and insurance, showed improvement from 2010.
Additionally, time-to-fix showed vast improvement, dropping to an average of 38 days-much shorter than the average of 116 days in 2010. “The developers know that 38 days is actually a really, really good number because they know how long it does take,” Grossman says. “But to the end users, 38 days is unacceptable.”
Steps to Improve Your Security Posture
To improve your application security posture and make the best possible use of your IT security budget, Grossman suggests you first determine whether you are a target of opportunity or a target of choice. Targets of opportunity are breached when their security posture is weaker than the average organization in their industry. Targets of choice possess some type of unique and valuable information, or perhaps a reputation or brand that is particularly attractive to a motivated attacker.
“On the Web, if you’re doing business of any kind, you’re going to be a target of opportunity,” Grossman says. “Everybody has something worth stealing to a bad guy these days. Other companies are a target of choice because they have something the bad guys want: your credit card numbers or IP or customer lists. This aligns with how secure you need to be. No one needs perfect security.”
If you determine you’re a target of opportunity, Grossman says, you need to make sure that you are a little bit more secure than the average business in your category. He notes organizations can use the data in its free WhiteHat Security Website Security Statistics Report to benchmark where they need to be.
Targets of choice, on the other hand, need to make themselves as secure as they possibly can and then prepare plans for how to react when they are breached so they can minimize the damage as much as possible.
Grossman also recommends that organizations hack themselves in an effort to understand how attackers will approach their Web sites. Additionally, he says organizations need to understand their benchmarks: which vulnerabilities are most prevalent in their Web sites, what’s their time-to-fix, their remediation percentage, average window of exposure, etc.
If you consistently see vulnerabilities of a particular type, like cross-site scripting or SQL injection, it’s a sign that your developers need education in that issue or your development framework may not be up to snuff. If your time-to-fix is particularly slow, it’s a good bet that you have a procedural issue-your developers aren’t treating vulnerabilities as bugs. If you consistently see vulnerabilities reopening, it suggests you have a problem with your ‘hot-fix’ process-high-severity vulnerabilities get fixed quickly but the change is back-ported to development and a future software release overwrites the patch.
“Understand your software development cycle,” Grossman says. “Understand where you’re good, where you’re bad and make your adjustments accordingly.”
