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4 Major Steps Of Web Application Penetration Testing

In the early days of the internet, security was little but an afterthought. Then as hackers started to exploit businesses' lax security postures, things gradually started to change. At first, nonprofits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation started pushing web users to embrace HTTPS Everywhere. In response, certification authorities began offering free SSL certificate variations to any site admin that wanted one. As a result, at least 79.6% of all active websites now use SSL.

That was only the beginning. In the ensuing years, developers and web application administrators gradually started to harden their apps against all manner of attacks. They rolled out more complex password requirements. They started to add two-factor authentication as a default measure. They even started putting public-facing services behind high-performance web application firewalls.

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How To Embed Data Protection Principles in the Application Development Process

The pace of digitization over the past two years has accelerated due to organizational needs driven by the ongoing pandemic. And that has meant that there's an ever-increasing flow of data now passing through digital channels that nobody anticipated. And for developers, it has spotlighted the importance of implementing clear data protection standards in everything they do.

But for developers who've never written software that requires a careful approach to data protection, it's not always obvious how to convert best practices into development standards. To help those who lack experience with embedding data protection standards into their development process, here's a guide to what they need to do.

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5 Simple Tips to Keep Dockerized Apps Secure

Ever since virtualization support went mainstream, developers have started to embrace containerization as a means of enhancing app security. And when used well, it's an excellent approach. Unfortunately, countless things can destroy the security benefits of containerization when overlooked.

But, short of taking some additional coursework on the subject, there aren't many places you can go to learn about the best practices of containerization. And since Docker is the most popular containerization option in the world right now, that seems like a natural place to start. Here are five simple containerization security tips to help you keep your Dockerized apps secure.

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4 Ways Data Science Will Improve Customer Communication Efficiency in 2022

Customer communication is fundamental to any business. Efficiently communicating with customers, resolving their issues, and answering their questions earns you their trust. You’ll see this reflected in both your sales figures and the reviews people leave online when it comes to nearly every review site. The reverse is true as well.

Unanswered emails. Hours spent on hold. Incompetent agents on the line. All this can easily result in lost business and bad reviews. In fact, 65 percent of customers have ditched businesses before due to a bad customer service interaction. When it comes to the data science field, people largely associate negative emotions with this kind of thing. That's because automation has traditionally made these communications workflows much worse. Communications barriers could be costing businesses around $37 billion a year, and that number keeps rising.

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What Will AI Bring to the Cybersecurity Space in 2022

Over the last year, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a huge part of our everyday lives, which is something of a mixed bag that has brought along a wide variety of both positive and negative influences. On one hand, there are algorithms that are designed to perform a largely marketing-related series of tasks, which are perhaps those best known to individuals outside of the technical space. Think of the algorithms curating your TikTok feed and personalizing suggestions on YouTube. The AI that calculates your fastest morning commute based on virtual maps, your vehicle, and current traffic conditions is also a fairly visible one that has had its share of media attention.

A particular area, though, in which AI has become crucial is cybersecurity. Cybercriminals are increasingly harnessing AI to automate breaches and crack complex systems. Sophisticated, large-scale social engineering attacks and deep fakes are prime examples of this trend. Perhaps more subtle techniques, such as those involving AI-driven data compression algorithms, will soon become an even more important part of the space in the year to come.

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How to Build Your Software Distribution CDN Using Mirrorbits

Lots of independent developers use GitHub or its equivalents to host their code repositories. And since they're simple to use and well understood by the public, that's a great idea. But as anyone who's ever created a project that attracted a whole lot of attention can attest, the platforms aren't well-suited to distributing binaries and other software releases.

In most cases, GitHub projects that post binaries do so by having a single server or VPS get triggered by a webhook to compile whatever binaries the project requires. And that means every time a user tries to download the resultant binaries, they’ll be making requests to that same single server instance. That's both inefficient and a recipe for download problems.

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How Companies Can Build Enterprise-ready Apps and Compete With the Giants

Smaller companies have traditionally been able to tolerate quirks and technical issues when deploying an app, but larger enterprises have never really had this luxury. In order for an app to be enterprise-ready, it has to be able to keep all of the information that passes through it safe regardless of how many different hands it has to pass through. Considering that some major financial and social media apps may share data with literally hundreds of partners, that's a bigger undertaking than you might imagine.

If an app has to interface with any outside service, then it's also faced with the challenge of keeping all of the additional data it collects secure. Performance issues also factor into the question of enterprise-readiness, especially when scalability features become an issue. A few simple criteria can help technicians judge whether or not any particular solution is ready for the big time.

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4 Cloud Data Security Features to Reassure Nervous SMBs

For years now, it's been clear that cloud storage was going to eventually supplant most on-premises data storage architectures. At the enterprise level, it's already happened. But further down the ladder, among small businesses, that's not the case yet. Part of the reason for that is the fact that some 61% of small businesses believe that their data won't be safe in the cloud.

What's odd about that is the fact that small businesses, as a group, already face some of the biggest security challenges for their on-premises infrastructures. According to the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report, small businesses now account for 28% of all successful data exfiltration events. That number increases each year because hackers now choose to go after the easiest possible targets – and they're it.

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Pandemic-Driven AI Adoption is Remaking Industries, Creating an Uncertain Future

Throughout 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has dominated headlines around the world, and rightly so. And for the most part, discussions about how it intersected with the technology world have centered on things like contact tracing and epidemiology research topics. But as the pandemic has continued to batter populations and economies everywhere, there's growing evidence that it's becoming a major digital change driver across a wide variety of industries, too.

One after another, surveys continue to uncover an acceleration of the ongoing trend toward AI adoption in multiple fields. One, in particular, found that 68% of businesses have increased their spending on AI technology as a part of their pandemic response. When all is said and done, we could be witnessing a fundamental shift that will leave the economic landscape looking very different than it did less than a year ago.