CISO No Longer the Last Word on Security – Radware

Radware, a security solutions vendor, teamed up with Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. (EMA) in July 2019 to conduct their third annual 2019 State of Web Application Security Report, which is a global, online survey. It collected 278 responses from executives and senior IT professionals at companies with at least 250 million USD/EUR/GBP in revenue and a worldwide scope. About one third of respondents hold an executive-level position (29%), another third of respondents are in senior management (27%) and the remainder are managers (32%). The report went after the big dogs in order to get their perspectives.

There are specifics in there that will make the security team uncomfortable about how effective their efforts are in the enterprise. For example, 90% of respondents reported a data security breach in the last 12 months, but only 56% were highly confident that they could keep customers' PII safe.

The breadth of attacks respondents experienced daily included access violations, session/cookie poisoning, SQL injections, denial of service, protocol attacks, cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, and API manipulations.

More than half of respondents said that their organizations interacted with APIs to share and consume data, while 17% only shared data, and 22% only consumed data via APIs. These figures are consistent with how organizations interacted with APIs in last year's survey. Access violations, (the misuse of credentials) and denial of service (DoS) are the most common daily API attacks reported in the survey.

More than a half of the organizations hosting applications in the cloud reported a security gap caused by misunderstandings with service providers about where security responsibilities rest. The report participants saw an underlying shift in how security was actually addressed in the enterprise. More than 90% of respondents said that their organizations have both Development Operations (DevOps) or Development Security Operations (DevSecOps) teams. These teams are relatively new, with only 21% of respondents reporting DevSecOps teams in place for longer than 24 months. More than half (58%) of organizations reported a ratio of between 1:6 and 1:10 DevSecOps to development personnel. When evaluating collaboration between DevOps and DevSecOps teams, 49% said the teams were working very closely while 46% said they were managing to work together.

The rise of DevSecOps may be the reason that 70% of respondents stated that the CISO was not the top influencer in deciding on security software policy, tools or implementation. While the CISO's organization is faced with responsibility for keeping the organization secure at all costs, the DevSecOps teams recognize that agility is critical to business operations. This view forces them to take a "good enough" approach to security.

"We are at an inflection point culturally between the role of DevSecOps and the CISO," Anna Convery-Pelletier, Radware's Chief Marketing Officer, said in a prepared statement. "Our research shows that respondents regardless of title feel that they have control over their security posture. Yet 90% of organizations still experienced lost data. This is a contradiction that speaks to the organizational differences between DevSecOps and traditional IT security roles."

— Larry Loeb has written for many of the last century's major "dead tree" computer magazines, having been, among other things, a consulting editor for BYTE magazine and senior editor for the launch of WebWeek.