Maintaining an online business presence nowadays means that malicious actors are going to target and likely exploit any application vulnerabilities they can find sooner or later. According to the 2021 Mid Year Data Breach Report, although the number of breaches has declined by 24%, the staggering number of records that were exposed (18.8 billion) means that there is still room for improvement.

How can you protect your business from the constant threat of exposure and security breaches? One crucial step is to establish solid foundational layers of security controls that check and validate every part of the SDLC. By using automation when performing those checks, you can detect and prevent common security risks and exposures before they end up in production.

Keep reading for a comprehensive overview of application security automation, along with four ways to automate security ops to protect the core of your business from data breaches.

What Is Application Security?

The term application security (AppSec) refers to the series of processes and tools related to security controls that development teams use during SDLC. Creating secure software is hard, mainly because there are myriad risks involved. Attackers prefer to target web applications instead of infrastructure components because these applications offer a convenient way to access databases or other internal systems. Defenders need to plug up every conceivable hole, while attackers only have to find one vulnerable spot. This often results in an uneven playing field.

To counter that pervasive threat, development teams must adopt effective methodologies and best practices for developing secure software. One way to do this is to utilize tools to analyze the code both statically and dynamically to pick up any known insecure idioms. For example, a tool might flag code that is implementing unsafe casting, secrets that have been committed to VCS, or a failure to close streams after they have been used. Developers can manually review these issues and fix them before they get deployed to production.

Another strategy is to scan application dependencies. For example, when developing a financial app, developers might use an open source library that offers a convenient currency model. But how would they know that this library was safe? Dependency scanners monitor those dependencies and check to see if they are out of date or suffer from open CVEs. That way, they will know as soon as possible if anything changes.

Writing secure software starts with integrating proper application security controls and automating the process. We will explain that part next. 

The Main Benefits of Automating Application Security

As we mentioned earlier, there are several tools and processes that development teams employ to flag risks in their software repositories. Automating this task helps you make the most of this process. That’s because you can achieve better coverage when looking for threats and find them sooner when you eliminate the manual parts of the process.

In addition, you will be better equipped to respond to security incidents. Your AppSec teams will have all the context they need to address any issues. Finally, you can achieve better compliance and auditing scores, since this eliminates the risks involved in working manually, such as skipped events and slower response rates. 

Next, we’ll explain four important ways to automate application security operations.

Four Ways to Automate Application Security Ops

1. Trigger Automated Security Flows as Part of Your CI/CD Pipeline

The best place to start with automation is to implement shift-left security within the CI/CD pipelines. When we say CI/CD pipelines, we mean the various steps that are taken when pushing code in a remote environment. These steps include admission to VCS and triggering the CI pipeline, static code analyzers, security alerts, bots, and notification systems as well as external security integrations. Incorporating these steps will give you the best chance of protecting your application from exploits.

2. Validate/Enforce Requirements and Perform Periodic Checks When You Create Repositories, Components, and Cloud Environments 

When developers create new repositories or provision new clusters that operate company accounts, there should be a preliminary check to apply basic security templates and policies. This will prevent gaps or missed security controls from the moment you create those resources until you actually use them. You want to create default standards for all components that prevent them from existing in a sub-standard security state. 

3. Orchestrate Follow-Ups for Application Security Findings, Assign and Escalate Issues, and Validate Fixes 

Once the system pinpoints security issues in your resources, you should use a separate mechanism to capture those events and store them in a threat intelligence platform. As we explained in this article on the basics of threat intelligence, you can pull and combine those indicators, run customized workflows, and deliver the information you collected to the system of your choice.

4. Automate Updates to Infrastructure-as-Code and Configuration Settings

Finally, consider your usage of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and your configuration settings. These internal tools are part of the developer tooling, and they are also susceptible to exploitation. You will have to enforce the same kind of rules and policies when using those programs. It’s even better if you have an automated tool that monitors and updates only the development tools in your infrastructure. This way, you will not risk exposure or a major upgrade process if some of them become outdated or are found to contain a known vulnerability.

Next Steps: Automating Application Security Ops with Torq

The best way to automate application security ops is to create a strong foundation of tools, processes, and techniques. Attackers are constantly trying to exploit vulnerable applications. However, automating application security ops doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, security and DevOps teams should be able to use a low-code platform to achieve those targets.

Torq offers a complete no-code platform for automating application security ops using threat intelligence, threat hunting, security bots, and workflow modules. You can request a demo here.

When we discuss cybersecurity and the threat of cyber attacks, many may conjure up the image of skillful hackers launching their attacks by way of undiscovered vulnerabilities or using cutting-edge technology. While this may be the case for some attacks, more often than not, vulnerabilities are revealed as a result of careless configuration and inattention to detail. Doors are left open and provide opportunities for attacks. The actual exposure in our systems is due to phishing schemes, incorrectly configured firewalls, overly permissive account permissions, and problems our engineers don’t have time to fix.

This article will introduce you to an actionable strategy to protect your environment using Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM). We’ll describe what CSPM is and why it’s essential for your organization to implement it. We’ll also cover some of the reasons why organizations fail to implement such a strategy effectively. Finally, we’ll explore practical and straightforward approaches that your organization can pursue right away to protect your digital assets and your consumer’s data.

What Is Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Why Is It Important?

When compared with a traditional data center, the cloud offers significant advantages. Unfortunately, our approach to securing a conventional data center doesn’t translate well to the cloud, so we need to recalibrate how we think about and enforce security. CSPM or Cloud Security Posture Management is the process of automating the identification and remediation of security risks across our ecosystem.

Cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud provide an expansive range of services and capabilities. While the cloud host takes care of patch management and ensuring availability, it’s the user’s responsibility to protect their data and services from malicious actors. In recent years, several high-profile data breaches have come about due to improperly configured storage buckets or through accounts with more access than required. 

Why Is CSPM Challenging and What Does It Cover?

The public cloud offers more than simply virtual servers and databases. Modern applications are composed of a multitude of services, each with unique permissions and access-control policies. The age of DevOps requires development teams to have access to a wide range of permissions and the organization’s trust that they’ll use that responsibility carefully. Unfortunately, mistakes happen; and especially in a model where distributed user accounts and systems constantly evolve, configurations and changes require a monumental effort to manage and monitor these accounts.

Visibility would be the core principle if we had to simplify the challenges of protecting your digital ecosystem into a single concept. A comprehensive CSPM strategy consists of providing visibility into all aspects of your environment. This visibility includes:

• Account and Permission Management
• Service Configuration
• Patch and Security Update Management
• Effective and Efficient Problem Resolution
• Vulnerability Scans of Applications and Third-party Libraries.

A CSPM solution provides visibility into each of these aspects, and tracks anomalies and suspicious changes as they happen. A CSPM automatically remediates potential problems and threats where possible, and raises appropriate alerts if automatic remediation isn’t available.

Implementing a CSPM Strategy

Implementing a successful CSPM strategy may seem a little daunting given the scope of what the solution needs to cover and the importance of achieving comprehensive coverage of your entire ecosystem. Most of the large cloud providers have services that can monitor changes within their environments. While they effectively monitor most services within their domain, they are limited to those same services. Ideally, you want to partner with an organization that has invested time and resources into CSPM solutions that can span the breadth of your organization.

Equally important to the coverage of the solution is the capacity for automation. Automated processes can be used for monitoring, analyzing, and remediation when possible. Given the dynamic nature of most environments, manual tracking may not be able to keep up with changes as your organization grows. Additionally, as with configuration and operational tasks, there is always the chance for human error, resulting in missed alerts or worse problems that are identified and then forgotten, as additional tasks and issues arise.

A successful CSPM solution uses automation extensively, monitoring and detecting problems and automatically remediating such problems or isolating them until the appropriate personnel can address them.

Practical CSPM Use Cases

Implementing an automated CSPM solution will alert you to potential vulnerabilities in your systems, misconfigured resources, and potentially harmful changes. Still, there is more to a CSPM solution than just detection and reporting.

Once the CSPM solution discovers an issue with your environment, a well-designed system will also assist with managing issues, performing such tasks as:

• Filtering issues by priority and severity so that you can devote resources to the most critical issues first.
• Organizing related issues and ensuring that issues aren’t duplicated across multiple systems.
• Periodically performing additional scans and tests to determine whether vulnerabilities and issues have already been addressed.
• Managing the assignment of issues to the appropriate owner within the organization and escalating tickets that might not be receiving proper attention.

In a nutshell, your CSPM solution should remove much of the guesswork associated with security scans, configuration management, and issue resolution. The system should handle many mundane tasks and only engage your engineers when necessary. This approach will free you and your organization to focus on delivering additional value to your customers and improving your existing offerings.

Learning More

As leaders in the field of automation, Torq is uniquely positioned to help you find and implement a CSPM solution that addresses your organization’s needs. Reach out to Torq to learn more about the services they offer and how they can work with you to improve the security of your systems and manage your cloud environments.

Recently, I started to read the invaluable book Software Engineering at Google. It’s a great book by Google, describing their engineering practices across many different domains.

One of the first chapters discusses the matter of making a “scalable impact,” which I find very interesting, and something that I believe has been overlooked by many organizations.

What is Scalable Impact?

Creating “scalable impact” is making a change that will improve your organization’s engineering practices without investing unnecessary effort for each new team member.

First, let’s review some examples that don’t demonstrate “scalable impact”.

What Hinders Scalable Impact?

1. Code Reviews

Code reviews have many advantages. Code reviews allow teams to share knowledge, catch design flaws, enforce common patterns and practices. Seems like a good idea, right? Well, the problem is —these don’t scale. The larger the team, the larger the effort, and this scales linearly with each new developer.

2. Manual QA

Similar to code reviews, manual QA for each release doesn’t scale. As a team grows, release velocity increases. As release velocity increases, more releases require manual QA —creating a bottleneck and single point of failure.

3. Manual deployment approvals

In many organizations, only a small, dedicated team can perform the actual deployment to production. Just as with manual QA, increased release velocity brought on by team growth turns this into a function that blocks scale.

4. Excessive documentation

Documentation is useful —it allows teams to share knowledge in-house and publicly without having to be there to personally explain things. But, as you create more and more documentation, there are two downsides: 1. You have to keep it up to date 2. Devs need to read it. And we DEVs, (or we as human beings…) can be lazy. We don’t like to do things that require a ton of effort; we love to take the easy way, if possible. We don’t read the docs and we definitely don’t update the docs if we change something. So in many cases, the end result is a waste of time, or an old and out-of-date document that no one even reads. In the end, the conventions you created may not be used anywhere.

How to Make Scalable Impact

Okay, so how exactly do you make scalable impact then? At Torq, we’ve adopted a number of practices that help us realize scalable impact and set our team up for successful growth. I’ll highlight each of these examples below, and talk through the details of them in a future post.

1. Centralized Linting

Let’s say that one day you decide all your developers have to avoid using errors.Wrapf and instead use fmt.Errof. At that point, most organizations tend to create a new convention page and write that down there. Later, a nice Slack message will be sent to the #rnd channel. Something like this:

“Hi there, we decided to stop using errors.Wrapf, please use only fmt.Errorf from now on. See the conventions here: …”

How many of you are familiar with this practice? If you’re familiar with it, you probably also realize this won’t work. 

Why, you ask? Because human beings don’t work well with rules, unless they’re reinforced. That wiki page describing the newest convention? It’s already depreciated the moment you wrote it.

So how do you solve that issue, then? My advice: Come up with a centralized linting solution. By centralized, I mean one that immediately affects all new builds, without any changes to your projects.

Returning to the example above, with centralized linting, you change your global linting rules. That means you immediately avoid any new usages of the old convention. No questions asked, and nothing to remember. It’s as simple as that — the PR won’t be mergeable unless the new convention is used. No documentation to maintain, no convention to teach new recruits. Your documentation is now the linting rules code. 

There you have it: Scalable Impact.

At Torq we use ReviewDog to achieve this, which I’ll describe in detail in a later post.

2. Unified/Reusable CI pipeline

Another story you may all be able to relate to: One day your CTO reaches out and asks for the full list of dependency licenses used across ALL your codebase.

So then you start googling and you find an awesome tool doing exactly that. But now you’re stuck. You have to run that tool and collect the results for ALL your projects, and we’re talking about minimum 50+ (or more for larger organizations).

Here’s the (happy!) twist: With unified CI Pipelines, this task becomes easy.

By unified, I mean maintaining a common baseline for all your CI pipelines. One that you can change from a single location, by doing only a single change.

To solve the above issue you will add that logic for license extraction to your common base and execute that as part of your CIs. Then, just let your CI do the rest.

Another (real) example: Let’s say you want to change your unit-testing runner.

You decided that gotestsum is the real deal, and your teammates chime in: “That old go test is useless. We MUST move to the new shiny tool.”

More opportunity for scalable impact: Just change the test part of your unified CI, and all your projects will use gotestsum instead of go test. 

To achieve this, we use Makefile inheritance and CircleCI orbs. Again, I’ll dig into this in a future post.

3. Automated E2E Tests

Nothing new here —each and every deployment should pass the same test suite. Again, every deployment.

Green -> deployed

Red -> rolled back

No “sanity suite”,  no “Ah, this one is flaky, you can go ahead and deploy”. No user intervention. Of course, this means your complete E2E suite should be fast and reliable (I use under 5 minutes as a rule of thumb).

Adopt the “Beyonce Rule”

“If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it!” said the mighty Beyonce in her famous song, Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).

Later, malicious DEVs took that line and rephrased it to “if you like it, put a [test, lint, e2e, ticket] on it!”

Put plainly, new investments or changes require you to put the right framework in place to make them scalable. Getting started with this requires having the right tools; but after that, it’s easy to adopt the practice.

Found a new issue that can be caught by a listing rule? Easy! Add the lint rule to your centralized linting solution.

Want to add a new tool that tracks the test coverage? Simple! Change the unified CI configs.

The upfront investment here helps the entire team grow, and delivers returns (in reduced toil, and increased velocity) over time.  Applying the Beyonce Rule turns your team from Danity Kane to Destiny’s Child. It becomes super easy to add/change the existing conventions and processes. The Beyonce Rule is cost-effective and can be easily adopted.