Summary

In this chapter, you have learned about the discovery and prevention process needed to fortify your application against attack. The process involves:

• Reviewing your application design to identify threats

• Focusing your attention on the most critical issues by prioritizing the threats

• Changing features or altering the design of your application to address the most important threats

• Establishing a means for identifying potential attacks or attacks that have occurred

If an attack occurs, you should:

• Execute a response plan created ahead of time (before the application ships).

• Fix the problem.

• Redeploy the application.

• Apply the lessons learned from the attack to prevent future attacks.

To more quickly respond to and remedy an attack, you should design features in the application that aid in detecting an attack and easing the update process when a fix is made available.

Not only should the process described in the preceding paragraph be applied to your application, but it should form the basis of a security plan that is applied across your organization. A security plan is effective in identifying organization-wide threats, helping to educate members of the organization about practices that make the organization more secure, and incorporating a plan for how to respond to an attack. A security plan is essential when the security issues and technology involved exceed the ability of any single person in the organization to understand what’s involved and what’s at stake. The security plan should incorporate best practices and lessons learned to help defend your organization against an ever-expanding set of threats brought on by an ever-expanding network environment.

The next chapter focuses on threat analysis and threat-mitigation techniques. The chapter walks through the employee management system (EMS) application as an exercise to help you identify and respond to vulnerabilities in your own application.