In today’s digital ecosystem, the expansion of application and API landscapes offers both opportunities and challenges for organizations. Advancements in application development and integration foster unparalleled business agility and innovation but also enlarge the attack surface, creating numerous opportunities for threat actors to exploit. This complexity presents a formidable challenge for IT security teams to maintain visibility and control, ensuring comprehensive protection against increasingly sophisticated adversaries.
The 2024 Application Security Report, based on a detailed survey of over 500 cybersecurity professionals, is aimed at uncovering current trends, challenges, and practices in application security.
Key findings include:
• Application Vulnerability: Half of the respondents report that their applications were compromised in the past year, highlighting the prevalent risk and the critical need for more robust security measures.
• Expertise Gap: Only 19% of security professionals identify as experts in application security, highlighting a significant need for further development of skills among the remaining 81% to effectively counteract cyber threats.
• Visibility Challenges: 45% of participants are not confident in their awareness of all applications used within their organizations, underlining the difficulties in achieving comprehensive application visibility.
• Bot Attack Concerns: 45% raised concerns over their preparedness to defend against sophisticated bots, emphasizing the evolving nature of threats that organizations face.
• Patch Management Hurdles: 40% of respondents acknowledge that they are unable to patch vulnerabilities in a timely manner, leaving organizations vulnerable to attacks.
We sincerely thank Fortinet for their essential contribution to this survey. The insights and best practices derived from this survey highlight the critical areas for organizations to focus their efforts in order to minimize and reduce their attack surface. With the right tools—those capable of discovering and enhancing visibility of digital assets while employing sophisticated measures like machine learning and threat analytics—businesses are better equipped to safeguard applications and APIs against advanced threats.
