Black Duck security risk assessments help you identify missing or weak security controls, understand secure design best practices, and mitigate security flaws that will increase your risk of a breach.
50%
of security incidents are caused by design flaws
Build security into application design
With increasing pressure to build and release software faster than ever, security controls that should be addressed early in the software development life cycle (SDLC) are often not addressed until it’s far too late.
Failing to build security controls into applications in the design phase causes:
- Inadequate protection against malicious attackers
- Weaker defenses against outside and inside threats
- Increased possibility of damaging threat events like data breaches
How do risk assessments minimize security incidents?
Risk assessments allow you to:
Identify assets
Document the relationship of all external and internal assets such as networks, servers, applications, architecture, data centers, tools, and more.
Create risk profiles
Risk profiles help you discover how risk-adverse or tolerant each asset is.
Understand security controls
Discover the current state of security controls (access control, firewall, intrusion detection, antivirus, etc.) and what data is stored, transmitted, and generated by each asset.
Prioritize remediation
Use risk rankings to assess the business impacts and prioritize remediation planning.
Evaluate risk from different vantage points
Threats and weaknesses come in different forms, from both external and internal sources and through a variety of systems, people, and processes. To get the most accurate view of the risk facing your applications, it’s important to look from different angles.
External security threats
Examine risk from an outside-in view to discover external component weaknesses
Threat modeling looks beyond canned and well-known threats to examine how the external components you rely on to build and run your applications can be susceptible to secure design violations, control misconfigurations, security control omissions, or misuse.
Learn more about threat modelingInternal architecture risks
Inspect risk from an inside-out view to discover deep-seated design flaws
Architecture risk assessments use known attack tactics and include a deep dependency analysis. Discover the relationships between your major components, assets, and threat agents to find system flaws in your application’s design.
Learn more about architecture risks
Uncover design flaws early in the SDLC
By creating threat models for external assets and components like your APIs, cloud infrastructure, and hosted data centers, you can begin to anticipate new forms of attacks and prioritize application risks by factors such as threats by likelihood.
An architectural risk assessment dives deeper by mapping and analyzing the correlation between threats, internal assets, and design structure to expose system flaws scattered throughout your application’s architecture.
Examining your application’s design through threat modeling and architectural risk assessments helps you uncover design flaws early in the SDLC that traditional testing methods often miss.
Prioritize fixes by ranking risks
It’s unrealistic to think that all security flaws can be fixed immediately. That’s why it’s important to rank your risks to understand the corresponding business impacts.
Once armed with risk insights, you can build a prioritized remediation plan that minimizes risks even when budget and resources are limited.
Protect data while meeting compliance demands
Any organization creating, storing, and transmitting confidential or personal information needs to be sure it’s also protecting its most critical data.
Whether you’re trying to meet a compliance requirement such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or FISMA, or you’re simply interested in implementing data security best practices, risk assessments will help you implement the highest standards of security controls to protect your data.
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