Team Synergy: 6 Tactics for Security & App Alignment

Maximizing Team Synergy: 6 Strategies for Seamless Security & App Alignment

There will always be a natural tension between cybersecurity teams and developers. After all, "improvement" is the function of the developer. They are willing and paid to build and deliver applications and innovations that help move the organization forward. However, security does play a role in ensuring that bad things don't happen when software updates are implemented, such as data breaches or loss of business services due to poor software.

In order to strengthen your organization's security and ensure a smooth operation, it's important to implement effective strategies to align security with application development.

Six ways to increase team cohesion in here is this important place.

Number 1: Emphasize training

App security training was offered to each new developer by an app security team with enough development experience that developers would respect. These AppSec experts with development experience understand the issues and frustrations developers face when security teams consume fewer than normal connections down.

Number 2: In AppSec training, use real-world examples from the development and security teams

Throughout AppSec training, instructors will discuss how to introduce vulnerabilities in code, such as injection errors, cross-site scripting, and access vulnerabilities and explain what these vulnerabilities mean for application and data security. While this narrative may be true, it is also extremely untenable. To spice things up and gain perspective, we found success by adding vulnerable applications that the security team discovered when running internal security tests.

Number 3: Remove the stigma of recognizing insecurity

We provided a slide at the beginning of our presentation that helped in eliminating the stigma of having a security weakness in your code. I won't reveal the name behind the ad, but the slide was about a prominent security expert. Developers' security software released as open source. There was an issue in his software development that was released as open source.

Number 4: Explain the real impact of weakness

We need to show developers how to exploit a vulnerability and what an attacker can do with that vulnerability. In one of the first trainings, the developer mentioned cross-site scripting and said that such a vulnerability might not be so harmful.

We showed them what an attacker can do with cross-site scripting attacks, such as impersonating a victim, gaining access to sensitive data, session hijacking, keylogging, spreading malware, and more.

Number 5: Security teams need to understand what makes sense

I have found that the friction between these two groups is often caused by the security team asking for unreasonable tasks. It's important to teach the development team how best to work with the security team during training and it is equally important for the security team to make sure their requests are reasonable. Sometimes there are unreasonable requests because the security team is asking for things that aren't the real issues that need fixing.

Number 6: Use accurate tools that enable developers

Ensuring the selection of accurate assessment tools is important because such tools provide clear descriptions of findings, assign appropriate levels of severity, and provide guidance for correcting weaknesses.

Conclusion: By using these six strategies to align security with application development, organizations can enhance the link between security strategy and application operations. If they adopt a collaborative and proactive approach to security about not only increasing the resilience of applications but also strengthening an organization's overall security posture.