What is Web Application Security?

Web application security involves the protection of websites, applications, and APIs (application programming interface) from attacks to keep them functioning smoothly and safeguard businesses from negative impact such as cyber vandalism, data theft, and unethical competition. The Internet’s global nature exposes web applications and APIs to many levels and types of attacks, which requires a multitude of strategies to cover different parts of the software supply chain.

Web applications are vulnerable to several common attacks, depending on what the attacker seeks to accomplish, the specifics of the targeted organization, and the application’s unique security holes.  These include zero-day vulnerabilities, denial-of-service (DoS) and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, memory corruption, buffer overflow, cross-site request forgery, credential stuffing, page scraping, API abuse, shadow APIs, and attack surface misconfigurations.

While the methods of attack constantly change, there are a few foundational elements of web application security. A few of these involve (DDoS) mitigation, web application firewalls, DNSSEC, and bot management. These safeguards have proven themselves to be essential in the ever-changing landscape of web attacks as they help to identify and prevent new vulnerabilities from being exploited.

Looking to learn more? We suggest heading over to Cloudflare’s Learning Center for an in-depth look at web application security.