03/28/2022 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 03/28/2022 09:51
Runtime security and system observability are critical to helping organizations eliminate blind spots that undermine effective DevSecOps objectives. Here's how an observability platform can identify runtime vulnerabilities.
Security blind spots pose a significant threat to an effective DevSecOps strategy and leave organizations vulnerable to attack-in some cases when applications are already live.
In December 2021, the emergence of the Log4Shell zero-day vulnerability demonstrated the potential impact of vulnerabilities in runtime. An effective DevSecOps strategy helps organizations to identify vulnerabilities throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to ensure the integrity of software in development and of runtime applications.
Integrating security too late in the SDLC, expanding cloud access, and delayed security testing are just a few examples of security roadblocks to effective DevSecOps.
In a recent session at Dynatrace Perform 2022, Dynatrace's Andreas Berger, senior principal project product manager of application security, and Christian Schwarzbauer, application security product architect, dissected the importance of integrated runtime security and system observability in detecting, identifying, and addressing these blind spots across organizations.
To be effective, Berger argues, modern application security requires speed and precision. "This is the core of what all security solutions should provide," he says. Solutions must keep pace with the quickly changing apps in cloud-native environments. "Security solutions should highlight what really matters without flooding everyone with false alerts."
Ultimately, security solutions should help organizations answer three key questions:
When it comes to finding and addressing runtime application security blind spots, a security solution should help you prioritize your efforts. But what does alert prioritization look like in practice?
With Dynatrace Application Security, prioritizing starts with its automatic and intelligent observability platform. Automatic discovery and instrumentation allows businesses to evaluate their entire environment in seconds, discover actionable information, and tap into real-time tracking on all affected processes.
Dynatrace Application Security automatically assesses risk based on AI_driven analysis and context.The challenge? Given the depth and breadth of DevSecOps-driven tracking, the number of reported security vulnerabilities is often substantial-so substantial that organizations are often unsure where to focus their efforts.
Berger lays out the following ways Dynatrace helps organizations to prioritize their security vulnerability risks:
It's one thing to detect issues before they happen, but what about handling attacks as they occur?
"While web application firewalls (WAFs) remain the de facto standard for app protection," Schwarzbauer notes, "they are not without their drawbacks." In particular, firewalls could potentially reject authorized resource requests if they are misconfigured.
"Another potential drawback," Schwarzbauer adds, "is no matter how strong a WAF is, attackers will eventually find a way inside the network." As a result, teams need to continually maintain and manage WAFs to keep evolving risks in check.
Dynatrace uses a full-stack observability approach to detect attacks as they occur.Runtime application security from Dynatrace makes it possible for IT teams to keep pace with attacks as they occur. While also identifying potential threats, their location, and the vulnerabilities they exploit, Dynatrace provides information about the entire attack path - from source IP to entry point, vulnerability type, and eventual database backend target.
Additionally, each stage of the security process specifies the code location and function used by attackers to gain entry. Armed with this information, businesses organizations are better equipped to improve security across the entire DevSecOps pipeline.
Simply put, by pairing runtime security with system observability, businesses are better prepared to detect, deflect, and defeat emerging security threats.
To learn more about the role of runtime application security and system observability in delivering on DevSecOps objectives, check out the full session, Address Log4Shell with ease: Why integrated runtime security and observability is key for DevSecOps.