Web security; a haven for hackers if you're not careful!

Web security is becoming more of more of an issue. In the Netherlands alone it’s at the heart of the daily news. For example the recent final report from a security company commissioned to investigate the DigiNotar attack shows that the compromise of the now-bankrupt certificate authority was much deeper than initially thought. Or the instance where a Dutch hospital reported a security breach whereby almost 50 confidential patient files were downloaded by a hacker. It’s important to bear in mind it’s not just bigger cases that get coverage in the press, but the threat is also (perhaps even more so!) to smaller companies and systems too. This is also because more often than not, in these cases there is limited access to expert advise or that the third party tools implemented do not cover all the security risks that are exposed to many of these web applications.

The question is what happens if you simply don’t know what the risks are, and more importantly how to take action to prevent a security breach? Luckily there are a number of open source tools that can help web applications manage the standard exploits. In fact we have been looking into this and will cover this in more detail in our next tech meeting, this Thursday 6th December. In this session we give some background information into some of the solutions available such as OWASP’s ‘Zed Attack Proxy’ (ZAP) and show how easy it is to apply these checks to your own website.

Register now and don’t let web security keep you awake at night and give you nightmares!