The 2025 State of Application Risk report from Legit Security found that every organization surveyed had high or critical risks lurking in their development environments. In 2024, for instance, one-third of the most severe application breaches stemmed from attacks targeting cloud infrastructure, while the remainder were primarily linked to compromised APIs and insufficient access controls.
The same report found that these organizations also had exposed secrets, with over one-third found outside of source code—in tickets, logs, and artifacts. What could be done? In this article, we will explore the top security strategies organizations use to protect against attackers who have a reputation for striking at any phase.
Start With Known Vulnerabilities
Before developers can guard against sophisticated attacks, it’s important that they first master the basics by starting with vulnerabilities we already understand. Prioritizing well-documented, high-impact risks like this lays a solid foundation for more advanced security practices.
Fortunately, several trusted organizations maintain comprehensive, up-to-date resources that every development team can incorporate into their workflows to help them code more securely from day one:
- OWASP Top 10: Maintained by the Open Worldwide Application Security Project, the OWASP Top 10 identifies the most critical security risks in web, API, mobile, and AI-driven applications. This list is considered essential knowledge for any developer serious about secure coding.
- MITRE: MITRE offers a powerful suite of cybersecurity tools and knowledge bases. The ATT&CK framework maps out real-world adversary behaviors, while the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) database catalogs prevent coding errors that lead to security flaws. MITRE also oversees the CVE Program, the authoritative source for publicly disclosed vulnerabilities.
- NIST NVD: The National Vulnerability Database, maintained by NIST, provides detailed metadata on known vulnerabilities, along with scoring systems (like CVSS), mitigation recommendations, and references to affected systems. It’s a central hub for security benchmarking and decision-making.
Developers getting comfortable with these resources isn’t just a recommendation—it’s the first real layer of defense. Fast-thinking organizations empower their engineering teams to proactively identify and mitigate known vulnerabilities, reduce risk exposure, and build a culture of security from the ground up.
Optimistic Cybersecurity and Non-Human Identities (NHIs)
Optimistic Cybersecurity is a novel approach to cybersecurity threats that’s changing the perspective of many industry players. It emphasizes the need for businesses to transform defensive mechanisms by integrating Non-Human Identities and Secrets Management into their cloud security control strategies to fortify their digital infrastructure and significantly reduce security breaches and data leaks.
Because not all defensive assets are human, Non-Human Identities have emerged as a key tactic in maintaining a secure cloud across a plethora of sectors, including healthcare, finance, and travel.
“ NHIs are machine identities essentially created by merging a ‘Secret’ and the permissions granted by a designated server. They are akin to tourists carrying encrypted passports that provide them a unique identity and monitored access. A holistic approach to managing these NHIs and their secrets marks a significant step towards solidifying cybersecurity measures. —- Alison Mack, cybersecurity partner at Entro.
Optimistic cybersecurity involves effective NHI use and management to reduce risk, improve regulatory compliance, enhance operational efficiency, and provide better control over access management.
Input Validation And Input Sanitization.
Two of the most essential—yet frequently underemphasized—secure coding practices for defending against cyber threats are input validation and input sanitization. These techniques serve as the first line of defense against a wide array of application-level vulnerabilities, including logic errors, injection attacks, and cross-site scripting (XSS).
Input validation ensures that user-supplied data adheres to expected formats, types, and constraints before being processed. By verifying that inputs such as strings, integers, file types, or URLs meet defined criteria, developers reduce the risk of logic flaws, data corruption, and downstream application failures. In 2025, as threat actors become increasingly sophisticated, mastering robust input validation has become non-negotiable for any team building secure-by-design software.
Input sanitization, on the other hand, focuses on cleaning, escaping, or removing potentially malicious content from input—such as embedded scripts or executable HTML. This is especially critical for applications that render user-generated content or interface with browsers and databases. Effective sanitization prevents client-side exploits like XSS, command injection, and malicious redirects that could compromise user sessions or backend systems.
Recognizing that application security is a dynamic, evolving field, forward-leaning organizations are taking a holistic approach. They pair code-level protections with broader operational security practices, including:
- Routine code reviews with a focus on input handling
- Automated security testing (SAST, DAST, fuzzing) integrated into CI/CD pipelines
- Role-based training tailored to development, QA, and DevOps teams
- Continuous monitoring for runtime anomalies and abuse of input channels
- Regular updates to frameworks, libraries, and validation patterns
- Penetration testing and red teaming to simulate real-world attack scenarios
Together, these proactive measures ensure that input validation and sanitization are not treated as isolated coding concerns but as integral parts of a mature and resilient application security program.
APIs and access control
In most modern cyber-conscious organizations, resource management and access control are two of the key pillars for building efficient, secure, and scalable systems. APIs allow users to interact with various resources, and as such, it is crucial to control these actions in ways that prioritize security concerns and consciousness.
This includes defining access to code bases, development tools, libraries, endpoints, and other assets. Best practices dictate employing a least-privilege approach to access and providing only the permissions necessary for users to perform their minimum required tasks.
“ APIs may be less visible, but they form the connective tissue of modern applications. APIs are now a primary attack vector, with API attacks growing 1,025% in 2024 alone. The top security risks? Broken authentication, broken authorization, and lax access controls. Make sure security is baked into API design from the start, not bolted on later.—- Jose Lazu for InfoWorld.
API security involves safeguarding application programming interfaces against threats and breaches, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the data and services they expose.
Best practices for API Security include:
- Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Assign permissions based on job roles to limit access to sensitive data.
- OAuth 2.0 for Secure Authentication: Use tokens for authentication instead of passwords to enhance security.
- Transport Layer Security (TLS) Encryption: Encrypt data transmitted between clients and APIs to prevent eavesdropping and tampering.
- API Gateways with WAF Integration: Use API gateways to manage access and integrate with Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) to protect against web-based attacks.
- JSON Web Tokens (JWT): Use JWTs for secure and scalable authentication and authorization.
- Regular Audits and Penetration Testing: Conduct regular security assessments to identify and fix vulnerabilities.
- Comprehensive Monitoring and Analysis: Implement logging and analytics to monitor API activity and detect suspicious behavior.
Sources: Cloudflare, GeeksforGeeks
The Hopeful Rise Of Agentic AI
Finally, according to Daniel Rohrer —VP of software product security at Nvidia, at the RSA Conference (RSAC) 2025, agentic AI can give cybersecurity defenders more power because they can have hive knowledge. Once organizations see one attack, this information can be shared instantaneously around the world as a template for automatically stopping such cybersecurity attacks.
This idea of «hive knowledge» suggests a future where security agents collaborate at machine speed to stop threats before they become globally widespread, and as such, it’s important for developers and cybersecurity hackers to be aware and in preparedness in anticipation of this future.
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