A business lives and dies by its IT infrastructure. And that infrastructure is only becoming more diffuse — team members log in from multiple devices, multiple locations, and need access to a multitude of specialized business services. With a larger attack surface, businesses struggle to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks(nieuw venster).
According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024, 40% of data breaches(nieuw venster) involved data stored across multiple environments. How can you ensure that the web applications you rely on as a business are safe?
In this article we’ll explain what web application security is, some common threats to watch out for, and how you can secure your web apps.
What is web application security?
Websites, web applications, and applications program interfaces (APIs) make up the majority of digital workers’ online lives. Organizations may use hundreds of web applications in their day-to-day operations. This increases the size and scope of their infrastructure, creating new potential entry points and vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit.
Web application security is the approach you take to mitigating and eliminating threats to your environment. It involves a combination of cybersecurity practices, including:
- Adhering to web application security standards recommended and overseen by industry experts, such as the Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP)(nieuw venster), which encourages developers to maintain their content in its GitHub organization(nieuw venster) to share and test security theories.
- Mitigating application vulnerabilities by maintaining and frequently updating libraries and components, updating and patching as often as needed.
- Choosing third-party web applications carefully, prioritizing fewer and more secure applications.
- Educating team members about online best practices and enforcing business cybersecurity standards such as multi-factor authentication, unique passwords for each account, and anti-phishing training.
All of these factors come together to protect your business from cyberattacks. Cybercriminals are developing sophisticated new measures every year: IBM reports in the IBM X-Force 2025 Threat Intelligence Index (nieuw venster)that that the number of infostealers delivered via phishing emails per week has increased by 84% year-on-year. It also reports that criminals are using AI to scale up their phishing attempts, both to increase the volume of emails they can send, and to use deepfakes to create more convincing scams. Taking this into account, securing your web applications is one of the best ways you can protect your business.
Common web application security threats
According to web application experts OWASP, the ten most critical security threats(nieuw venster) to web applications are:
- Broken access control, a vulnerability created when user permissions aren’t sufficiently defined, allowing users to take unauthorized actions.
- Cryptographic failures, which can lead to sensitive data breaches.
- Injection (SQL injections and cross-site scripting, known as XSS), which sees attackers injecting hostile code into SQL databases to gain access to restricted data.
- Insecure design, which occurs when architectural flaws are built into a business system.
- Security misconfiguration, which is created when security and installation settings aren’t configured correctly.
- Vulnerable and outdated components, which can include libraries, applications, and APIs that haven’t been updated.
- Identification and authentication failures, wherein an application allows weak passwords, has weak or ineffective two-factor authentication (2FA), or allows credential stuffing attacks.
- Software and data integrity failures, which are created by code and infrastructure that isn’t adequately protected against integrity violations and application security vulnerabilities, such as auto-update functionality being attacked.
- Security logging and monitoring failures, which allow data breaches to go unnoticed due to lack of detection mechanisms.
- Server-side request forgery, which attackers use to force an application to send a request to an unauthorized destination.
If you aren’t a web application developer, it’s likely you aren’t responsible for the configuration of your workplace apps. But you’re still responsible for web app security; everyone is, no matter their role or their tech experience.
Best practices for your organization’s cloud web security
Let’s examine some of the ways that everyone in your workplace can contribute to keeping your web apps secure and preventing data breaches.
Make logging in secure and easy
Your network access control policies determine who can access which tools and what data within your business network. But giving team members too many accounts to log into can create password based friction. Making logging in both easier and more secure is in your company’s best interest: Single sign-on (SSO) is an identity and access management tool which allows team members within your business network to access all of their work applications using one set of credentials.
Proton Pass for Business, an end-to-end encrypted password manager, offers SSO for businesses, offering you the chance to reduce password-based friction while increasing the overall security of your business. Proton Pass also allows you to enforce policies around access management, mandating two-factor authentication (2FA), creating requirements for all new passwords generated in Proton Pass, and limiting whether business data can be shared outside your network.
The stronger your security standards for logins are, the less likely it is that anyone without permission will be able to access your network through any of your web apps.
Create strong, unique passwords for software as a service (SaaS) accounts
A web application can also be provisioned as a software as a service (SaaS) application. With a SaaS application, users access the application through their browsers. SaaS applications are commonplace thanks to their flexibility: businesses can pay monthly for cloud-based software as opposed to buying it outright. Think of Microsoft’s Office365 or Slack. Users have no access to the infrastructure of the app, which is both a pro and a con. Team members can use the software without any system requirements, but they also have no control over the potential web application security vulnerabilities within the infrastructure.
In this case, the best thing team members can do to protect themselves and your business is to create a strong, unique password for each web app account. This way, even if a password falls into the wrong hands, it won’t unlock more than one account. Plus, if the team member affected is already using 2FA, then the risk is even further reduced.
Proton Pass works perfectly as a place to create, store, and autofill passwords for every team member. Once every account has a secure password, team members can rest assured their passwords are stored safely within a reliable password manager while they use SSO to work faster.
Create a cybersecurity incident response plan
One of the best ways to protect your business from attacks and data breaches is to plan what you’ll do in the event that you’re affected. If your network is breached and sensitive data leaks, you need a plan of action for how you’ll identify, limit, and ultimately eliminate the threat. We’ve written at length about exactly how to create your own incident response plan, but the short version is:
- Create a full map of your infrastructure to gain visibility of all entry points and vulnerabilities in your network.
- Appoint a designated cross-department team to lead your response.
- Plan what you’ll do before, during, and after an attack: How will you prevent one? In the event that one occurs, how easy is it for you to remove access to web apps within your business? And what can you learn from each cybersecurity incident to prevent the next one?
Creating a thorough plan will help you respond quickly and carefully, which could be the difference between reputational loss, financial losses, and potential legal repercussions.
Encrypt your data
Sensitive data is valuable to hackers because they can sell it on the dark web or use it to attack your business with phishing scams. As an example, Ticketmaster was affected by a data breach in 2024(nieuw venster), impacting up to 560M users, and the collected data was sold on the dark web. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) estimates that Any data you’re responsible for must be protected, which is best done with encryption. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which governs how organizations handle the personal data of EU citizens, recommends encryption as an important measure for data protection.
Encryption uses complex algorithms to encode data so that only someone with permission can access it. Typically when you share a file on the internet, it’ll be decrypted and encrypted a few times as it travels between computers and servers. This means that at some points during its journey, the data isn’t fully private. End-to-end encryption eliminates this risk by keeping files encrypted at all times, making it a superior option.
All data within Proton Pass and the wider Proton ecosystem is end-to-end encrypted. Your business can use Proton Pass to store passwords, email addresses, credit cards, and other data safely thanks to our end-to-end encryption.
Protect your web apps with Proton Pass
No matter how many or few web applications your business uses, you can benefit from stringent cybersecurity standards. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report 2024(nieuw venster), the average global cost of a data breach is now $4.88 million, the highest figure recorded yet. Cyber threats are only increasing, so make access management and cybersecurity easy for your organization with a the best business password manager out there: Proton Pass for Business.
