Sub-par cybersecurity in business apps has led to the average organization being breached twice in the past year, a new report from Barracuda claims.
The cloud security firm polled 750 application security decision-makers for its “State of application security in 2021” paper and found that a third (32 percent) suffered two breaches as a result of poor application security. Roughly one in seven (14 percent) reported three breaches.
Of all the different challenges, bad bots were identified as the biggest one (43 percent), followed by software supply chain attacks, vulnerability detection and securing APIs. Of the 750 participants, almost half (44 percent) said bot attacks contributed to a successful security breach that exploited a vulnerability in the organization’s applications in the last 12 months.
For years now, businesses have been trying to digitally transform their operations in order to cut costs, improve efficiency and provide a better user experience. Applications, and more notably – cloud-based applications, have become a central point in that endeavor.
“Applications have been steadily rising as one of the top attack vectors in recent years, and the rapid shift to remote work in 2020 only intensified this,” said Tim Jefferson, SVP, Engineering for Data, Networks and Application Security, Barracuda.
With the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown, having a well-organized digital experience has become even more important, and cybercriminals have been paying attention. Many organizations were forced to rush into the digital realm in order to remain operational, which is why cybersecurity took the back seat in many cases.
“Organizations are struggling to keep up with the pace of these attacks, particularly newer threats like bot attacks, API attacks, and supply chain attacks, and they need help filling these gaps effectively,” Jefferson concluded.
