Web development security best practices for 2022

When you decide to create your own website or web application ensuring the highest web development security is of a greatest importance. As cybersecurity systems providers come up with more advanced solutions for developers and companies, cybercriminals work tireless on creating new techniques of attack in order to breach projects’ defenses. Read our article to learn more about security best practices for web developers.

Web development security challenges and importance in 2022

When the web development project starts, developers and project managers have to think of the most reliable solutions that will allow them to enable secure web programming. There are many security challenges that should be considered by a development team to provide customer with secure digital product and to make customer’s data safe from external threats.

The major threats you have to remember about ensuring security in website development are:

• Unauthorized access — if the project will not be well secured with authentication methods and access control, you may find attackers intercepting data of a software house, its’s customers and end-users.
• Injection attacks — this type of attack may result in losing control over your own project and data.
• Cross Site Scripting — successful XXS attack leads to theft of user session IDs, which in fact means, that digital product’s end users will be vulnerable to phishing attacks.

The most difficult challenges you may encounter while establishing a web development security strategy are:

• Educating all parties involved — there are often many users involved in web development (not only developers, but also a client, his employees and business partners). To ensure safety of the project, all those people have to be educated about the threats and the best practices of dealing with them (protecting passwords, not clicking suspicious links in correspondence etc.).
• Defining roles on the project — understanding that not everybody has to get access to everything is crucial. We don’t share all the files and we don’t give the same system’s access to anybody involved in the project.
• Selecting the right cybersecurity solutions — each project is different. In order to select proper systems and methods of securing web development process, each development team has to take some time, and consider its cybersecurity approach carefully.

How to ensure security for web developers and their projects?

Some website development security practices are more effective than others. We explain, how we secure our processes and provide you with a few suggestions.

1. Make sure that everyone follows website development security best practices

Before the very development process starts, the communication channels for parties involved should be defined as well, as some best practices to follow when logging to the systems and applications that will be used on the project.

Security in website development is not only a domain of developers and cybersecurity team. Anyone can compromise systems and leave them open for attacks. All people that participate in the project should be included in web development security best practices. This of course requires educating a lot of people about potential threats, but is also minimizes the risk.

2. Adopt framework that enables secure web programming

You should think carefully, what kind of technology you want to leverage in your project. We don’t mean here a strategic approach to cybersecurity, but actually the choice of the tech stack for your website or web application. In Soft Gorillas we use Flutter for mobile development and Laravel, Symfony and Vue.js for web application development. All these frameworks are leveraged and regularly improved in terms of cybersecurity by developers all over the world. The built-in cybersecurity features of mentioned development solutions can be supported by implementing additional, external cybersecurity solutions.

All applications we develop are tested with caution. We make sure that we identify all weak spots and implement the best monitoring systems that allow immediate response to potential threats.

3. Define roles and leverage access control

When many people and organizations are engaged in the project, the risk of data leaks and cyberattacks grows. That is why we define roles in our systems and control the access to business information. All users involved in web development are provided with only as much access to data, that they need in order to carry out their tasks. By granting users limited access to data, we ensure website development security during all stages of the project.

Thanks to leveraging high level of control and defining the roles for participants, the attackers will not get access to all the vital information regarding the project. If the data cannot be accessed, it cannot be stolen, used or destroyed by cybercriminals.

4. Integrate additional cybersecurity solutions

As we mentioned earlier, we don’t only rely on frameworks’ built-in security features. We collaborate with providers of the most advanced cybersecurity systems. Each project’s safety is assessed by our experts, so we could select the right cybersecurity solutions. The choice of the proper methods of protecting databases and systems is most important, especially in the case of e-commerce and financial projects, as they often involve integration of payment solutions and use of sensitive data.

Our clients also come to us, which some projects that require modifications in terms of cybersecurity. We advise them on the best approach and implement additional website development security in order to enhance their current solutions. It is essential to test the existing code, look for the potential weak spots and secure an application. Automation of the processes on the project leaves little space for mistakes, so you should learn if the software house you pick for your project automates some tasks in web development.

5. Require input validation

Cyberattackers can try to take control over your applications by overwriting your code. Fortunately, you can easily prevent it, by implementing input validation. It is a programming technique that allows your systems to verify, if the input is properly formatted. If not, data in the wrong format will not be accepted by a software component and will not be able to affect your application negatively.

Well-written application should be able to analyze data syntactically and semantically before using it. The most important is server-side validation. Of course client-side validation can prove to be useful for both functional and security purposes, but it is backend validation that actually protects your application from the attack.

6. Encrypt your data

To be safe, you should assume that any application can be accessed by unauthorized users, if they have enough resources and skills. That is why protecting only systems is not a good enough strategy when it comes to cybersecurity. You have to focus on protecting data as well, to make it unreadable for those who may steal it.

Encryption is a standard in today’s IT world. The goal of this process is to encode the information, so no one can read it, even if your systems defenses will be compromised. You should not only encrypt data that is in use, but also data “at rest” (such that is stored in databases or other data storage types for future use).

How to find a software house which performs secure web application development?

Ensuring web development security is not easy. If you want your project to be protected, you have to select a software house who follows all mentioned security best practices. Don’t forget that cybercriminals never rest and they try to come up with new, more effective attacks. That is why solutions leveraged by an IT company have to be regularly evaluated and improved if needed. You can rely on our web development security strategy. Contact us, to learn more about our work.