Far from the days of just phone calls and text messages, mobile apps have captured our attention with efficient experiences that keep us connected to friends, family members, coworkers. It’s all at your fingertips via these amazing apps- anywhere in the world! This blog post takes you through the OWASP mobile top 10 security risks, attack scenarios from OWASP and risk remediations that help cybercriminals get their hands on sensitive data.

Data leaks can happen in many ways, and they’re surprisingly common. For example, a company might be hacked by cybercriminals; someone may lose their laptop with sensitive information; employee records could get lost during the relocation process. It doesn’t take much for sensitive information to get into the wrong hands. In fact, research has found that more than half of all data leakages come from human errors like typos and lost files.

Physical penetration tests are meant to simulate real-world scenarios to help assess the vulnerabilities and risks that could compromise a company’s physical security. Specialists often carry them out in this field who know how to access sensitive information, bypass controls, intercept network traffic and EM waves and more! Physical penetration testing is a vital part of any company’s security.

LDAP is a way for organisations to store user credentials and use them later. It provides access control as well as mechanisms to read and modify data. If the LDAP server isn’t properly configured or secured with another layer of protection, then it could be vulnerable to an attack called LDAP injection. However, you can only protect your applications if you: 1) know what LDAP is and 2) understand what can go wrong with it.

An Advanced Persistent Threat is a sophisticated (rarely) multi-staged attack carried out by skilled and well-organised threat actors such as organised cybercrime syndicates and nation-state actors. The majority of the times, Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) are nothing more than a fancy name with much more media frenzy around the topic of cyber attacks.

Many compliance standards focus on protecting individual personal information and sensitive data in a world rife with cyber-attacks and data breaches. Now, companies need to make their systems immune to digital intrusion and prepared to reduce the attack surface for strong information security measures around private information. Data breaches are becoming a norm through the more and more rapid transition of physical businesses to online businesses and more online activities.

Hashing is a one-way function that outputs a fixed-length string, where it’s impossible to decipher back into the original input. Encryption is a reversible process used to scramble data so that it can’t be read. So, if you’re looking for a way to keep your passwords safe and secure, look no further than hashing! But there is a slight catch here that relates to the term salting.

The goal of system hardening (or security hardening) is to reduce the attack surface. It includes reducing security risks and removing potential attack vectors. By removing superfluous programs, accounts functions, applications, ports permissions access etc., the reduced attack surface means the underlying system will be less vulnerable, making it harder for attackers or malware to gain a foothold within your IT ecosystem.

Security controls can be physical or virtual, policies, training, techniques, methodologies, action plan, devices, and customised solutions to avoid, detect, and prevent intruders and minimise the security risk befalling the individual or organisational proprietary information systems, etc.

SSL TLS are two encryption protocols that provide security for communication over the internet. SSL protocol has been around for many years, but both are still widely used today. Why is this? The answer is simple: these protocols work well to encrypt data sent between a client and server computer, which can be very important in protecting sensitive information such as credit card numbers or passwords. But what really sets them apart from each other?