Take a look at the headlines in any security news outlet and one thing really stands out. There are data breaches everywhere. That happen all the time, to organizations that know better. And it’s not like anyone wants a data breach. In fact, just the opposite is true. Companies try really hard to prevent them, often to no avail.
So, why are so many data breaches happening? The truth is there are a lot of reasons. According to Help Net Security, two of the biggest reasons are social engineering and unsecured databases. In addition to these though, there is another, often overlooked reason.
Treating Cybersecurity as a Project
If any part of your company’s cybersecurity effort involves checking a box to indicate that an activity is complete, you’re probably doing cybersecurity wrong. In the world of data breaches, safety is never complete. The best you can do is safe for now.
An overlooked reason why there are so many data breaches is because many companies treat cybersecurity as a project to be completed, rather than an ongoing process. And it can never be truly effective as a completed project because vulnerabilities accumulate. Something what is safe today is unsafe tomorrow by virtue of the fact that time has passed.
Research done by Veracode “found that flaw build-up over time is such that 32% of applications are found to have flaws at the first scan and by the time they have been in production for five years, 70% contain at least one security flaw.”
No matter what cybersecurity product or service you use, for it to be effective enough to thwart data breaches, it cannot be in support of a project. It must be part of an ongoing processes, with no end date.
Even Threat Modeling Needs to be a Process
Almost any cybersecurity tool you employ can be used as part of a project or to facilitate an ongoing process. That holds for static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), penetration testing (pen testing) and even threat modeling.
As effective as threat modeling is at proactive security and “shifting left”, it isn’t very effective if you only use to be proactive once or shift left once. It must be an integral part of the CI/CD pipeline—baked right into the DevOps practice.
The good news? If you’re committed to making cybersecurity in general, and application security in particular, an ongoing process, the most advanced threat modeling tools today seamlessly integrate right into the CI/CD pipeline, turning DevOps into true DevSecOps.
Embedding threat modeling into the development process enables it to automatically and continuously detect threats and design flaws. And that’s how you prevent data breaches. With an ongoing process that automatically and continuously finds those things that make applications vulnerable to data breaches.
If you’re not sure where to find a threat modeling tools that does all that, we suggest you start your search with ThreatModeler. ThreatModeler is a threat modeling platforms that identifies threats in applications on-premises, in the cloud and everywhere in between. Have questions? Feel free to ask them here.