How to make your web apps resistant to social engineering

Social engineering takes advantage of the emotions and fallibility of end users rather than relying on technical hacking techniques — and it represents a massive threat to modern organizations. According to research gathered by Firewall Times, 98% of all cyber-attacks involve some sort of social engineering, and up to 90% of malicious data breaches involve a social engineering attack.

With numbers like these, it’s clear that securing your digital assets — including your external web applications — should be a top priority.

However, the insidious nature of social engineering attacks makes them particularly tricky to guard against. Despite this, there are still things that you can do to make your web apps more resistant to social engineering.

Let’s take a closer look at the specific strategies and best practices you should follow to help protect your external web applications.

Mitigating social engineering risks

Research by Verizon shows that web application attacks comprise 26% of all breaches. With this in mind, consider implementing these strategies at your organization to protect your web applications and reduce the chance of falling victim to social engineering.

As you’ll notice, none of these strategies are foolproof on their own, so a layered approach is needed.

Offer ongoing end user training and awareness: Informed users are your organization’s first line of defense against social engineering attacks. Offer employees regular training, providing information on recognizing phishing attempts and ways to handle sensitive information safely. 

For web applications, train users on how to verify a website’s authenticity, recognize a secure or insecure connection, and understand the importance of not reusing passwords across different services. However, remember that it’s not fair to place full responsibility on end users – they’ll need support from technology.

Follow principle of least privilege: Employees should have access to just the digital assets they need to do their jobs — and not a file more. For web applications, this may include restricting access to sensitive data, functionality, and administrative interfaces based on a user’s role.

Ensure that your users have the minimum level of access they need to perform their tasks, as this can help minimize the potential damage of a social engineering breach.

Although be aware that skilled attackers are able to escalate their privileges, so all accounts need strong password protection.

Deploy multi-factor authentication (MFA): MFA isn’t a silver bullet, but it does add an additional layer of security by requiring users to provide two or more verification factors before accessing the system.

This additional layer of protection is often enough to deter attackers, even if they’ve already used social engineering tactics to gain access to a user’s credentials.

Perform regular security audits and penetration testing: To identify vulnerabilities in your web applications before hackers do, ensure you conduct frequent security audits and penetration tests. Insist that your penetration testing includes social engineering simulations so you can gauge your team’s preparedness and identify (and remedy) any weaknesses. 

For the greatest level of protection, consider a pen testing as a service (PTaaS) solution. Unlike annual pen testing that can’t keep up with your modern-day development cycles, PTaaS helps secure your web applications at scale, providing continuous monitoring.

Create an incident response plan: The old saying, “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail,” holds true in cybersecurity. Ensure you have a robust incident response plan that includes procedures for responding to social engineering attacks.

Your plan should outline immediate steps to contain and mitigate the attack and communication plans for informing affected parties.

Best practices for developers and IT pros

Securing external web applications against social engineering attacks requires a deliberate, comprehensive approach. And certainly, human behavior will always be the most unpredictable aspect of cybersecurity.

But there are ways that you can mitigate your organization’s risk and boost your resilience. By implementing these best practices, you can better protect your external web apps. 

Use HTTPS and SSL certificates: Secure your web application by using HTTPS and SSL certificates. Having these certificates in place will help you protect your web application users’ privacy and security, ensuring that their data is encrypted, authenticating your site's identity, and maintaining the integrity of the transmitted data. 

Update and patch systems regularly: To protect against attacks that target known vulnerabilities, ensure you regularly update your systems and software with the latest security patches. Keeping your systems up to date is a fundamental security practice that can significantly deter potential attackers by closing off otherwise easy access points into your network.

Implement strict data handling procedures: Prevent injection attacks by rigorously validating and sanitizing input data. Validate inputs — for example, by ensuring an email address is correctly formatted — and sanitize inputs by removing or escaping potentially harmful HTML or SQL elements.

Perform regular web application monitoring and audits: You don’t know what you don’t know — which is why it’s so important to regularly collect and analyze data about your web application’s performance. By tracking your web application’s performance and activities, you can spot unauthorized access, data breaches, or denial of service attacks early, giving you an opportunity to mitigate their impact — or stop them in their tracks.

For the most effective monitoring, use tools specifically designed for detecting and blocking suspicious activities. For example, web analytics software can identify unusual traffic patterns or sources, alerting you to potential reconnaissance activity, and web application firewall software can block attack attempts in real-time by inspecting incoming traffic for malicious patterns.

Boost your resilience with PTaaS

Penetration testing is one of the best ways to find vulnerabilities lurking within your web applications. However, it can be expensive and time-consuming to repeatedly onboard new pen testing providers.

Outpost24’s Pen Testing-as-a-Service solution (PTaaS) offers a different approach, combining manual and automated methods to deliver rigorous testing security monitoring and risk detection on an ongoing basis.  

Outpost24’s large pool of in-house experts manually review all findings with a senior pen tester, eliminating the chances of false positives wasting your team’s time.

With PTaaS, all vulnerabilities are reported immediately via a secure portal where you can communicate directly with pen testers – so you don’t need to wait around for final reports while vulnerabilities remain open to exploitation by hackers.

Boost your resilience against social engineering by speaking to an expert about how Outpost24’s PTaaS could fit in with your organization.  

Sponsored and written by Outpost24.