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Organisations that outsource almost half of their coding work are the likeliest victims of hackers, suggesting applications remain an open window into corporate networks. With this in mind, the hacker’s future looks rosy as outsourcing applications is on the up, with almost eight out of ten outfits saying it is critical to their business. Yet protecting their assets is being taken lightly: 60% of outfits that outsource code for their core applications do not mandate that security must be built in before. Financial organisations are the likeliest candidates to outsource their code development needs - typically 40% goes to third parties, followed by the public sector. Delivering these findings, analysts at Quocirca pointed out that statistics already show that the software application layer is where most hackers access critical data. In fact, the National Institute of Standards and Technology estimates that 92% of vulnerabilities affecting computer networks are contained in software applications. Typically, a rogue developer places vulnerabilities in the code that they develop, perhaps by placing a backdoor in software that can be used to infiltrate a network in the future. “[Organisations] are entrusting large parts of their application development needs to third parties,” said Fran Howarth, principal analyst at Quocirca. “This creates an even greater onus for organisations to thoroughly test all code generated for applications—without which they could be playing into the hands of hackers.” In the research, based on interviews with 250 IT directors across the globe, a brazen 20% of companies said they never considered security when building their applications. Yet German organisations are better at building in security than both their UK and US counterparts, with all in agreement that Web 2.0 technologies present the greatest risk to the network. Howard Schmidt, former cyber security advisor for the White House said: “These survey results help explain the recent, sudden rise in data breaches and should serve as a wake-up call to any executive whose company sits on a pile of mission-critical application code. “ Apr 8, 2008 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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