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At the end of last month on September 23rd, an anonymous security researcher disclosed a zero-day exploitin vBulletin, one of today’s most popular applications for website comments. The vulnerability, which affects any vBulletin server running versions 5.0.0 through 5.5.4, allows attackers to remotely execute code or gain privileged access to affected servers. 

Web apps face evolving threats that include attacks from all types of automated bots. Bot automation continues to advance at an alarming pace, even outpacing most traditional detection and blocking technologies. A new approach is needed to accurately detect and block the most sophisticated automation seen today. Instart’s client-side, fact-based approach to detection and blocking provides a number of advantages over the complex server-side anomaly-based analysis approaches used by other vendors. 

In the world of web applications, bots are nothing new — in fact, bots are almost as old as the Internet itself. Without bots, search engines like Google wouldn’t exist, especially when you consider that today’s indexed web is over 6 billion pages.

When it comes to security breaches, we’re no longer living in an era of “if” — it’s just a matter of when your first breach (or next breach) will happen. The average cost of cybercrime for an organization is now $13 million, and the average number of security breaches increased over the last year by 11 percent. 

Would you buy a house missing 40 percent of its roof, or board a boat with a hole in the bottom? Of course not. Unfortunately, organizations relying on a hardware stack to secure their web presence are as vulnerable to disaster as a homeowner with a missing roof. That’s why many businesses are looking for new solutions to meet their application security needs. In fact, Forbes recently reported a decline in sales of "on-premises" security as many businesses switch away from appliance-based security solutions and move to the cloud.

We recently enabled a successful cloud application migration for one of the largest online pharmacies. The customer had struggled with how to roll out new microservice applications in a phased manner, but prevent individual visitors from flipping back and forth between the old and new experience. This real-world example demonstrates how a complex cloud migration exercise looks from an application delivery perspective - including the high-level plans involved, complex dependencies, and how Instart helped this customer execute this activity in a seamless way with zero downtime. 

As businesses improve security, cyber attackers find new weak points and online attacks evolve. Today’s web apps use numerous third-party scripts — expanding the security perimeter to include the browser and leaving businesses without a true end-to-end security solution in place vulnerable to attack.

A data breach is the business equivalent of a natural disaster. The initial experience brings business as usual to a halt, and the recovery period is long, arduous — and expensive. As with natural disasters, an emergency plan can mitigate the impact of a data breach. Is your business prepared for the worst-case-scenario?