Protect Software Development Environment

Organizations pay little to no attention on securing their software development environment, which comes to haunt them in the long run. The software they create lacks the security and contains loopholes which can easily be exploited by hackers. Irrespective of how many features you pack into your software and how well it performs, if it is not secure, it won’t be as effective.

Hackers usually target software development environments. It helps them in injecting malicious code in the software development pipeline and perform different actions as well. How can you safeguard your software development environment in such a situation?

In this article, you will learn about how you can secure your software development environment.

Create An Inventory of Your Digital Assets

The first step of securing your software development environment is to maintain an inventory of all your digital assets. Focus on assets that come in direct contact with your software development team. Once you know which devices your software development team is using to access and store code, you can protect them. 

You can implement security controls to safeguard your most critical data first. These types of security controls encompass everything from hardware to software as well as log management, cybersecurity protection such as DDoS protection and access management. Moreover, it also covers application security, email security and incident response.

You can also take advantage of asset discovery tools especially if you have a huge inventory of assets. This will not only make your job easier but also help you detect and remove unauthorized assets. What’s more, it will help you practice good security hygiene, which goes a long way in improving the overall security posture of your organziation.

Use Secure Authentication Methods

Yes, this might sound trivial as it is the basic principle but still most businesses don’t have secure authentication methods in place. A majority of businesses are still using passwords for user authentication instead of more secure authentication methods such as biometric verification. Threat actors are always looking for opportunities to gain access to your systems so they can inject malicious code in your software. They will only succeed if you have insecure user authentication in place because it is easier for them to bypass them.

Change Management Controls

The best way to secure your software development environment is to think of the worst case scenario. Let’s say, a team of cyber criminals has already succeeded in compromising your system. What steps can you take to minimize the damage in such a situation? That is where multi factor authentication or adding a security question can come in handy.

Even if the hacker manages to guess or steal your passwords, they won’t be able to get their hands on access tokens, keys and sensitive information. Ensure that all the changes made to your systems are reviewed by multiple parties. This will make it tough for hackers to get through. Only accept changes which are verified by all the stakeholders.

Embrace Zero Trust

With more and more businesses leveraging cloud computing and uploading code in cloud based repositories, the number of attacks targeting those cloud based code repositories have also increased. Unfortunately, the protection you have on premises such as a firewall, encryption and VPNs are missing in a cloud based setup, which makes them more vulnerable.

Despite these downsides, you can still use cloud based repositories but make sure to adopt a zero trust approach. This means that you will have to evaluate every permission request before granting them access to your data. In today’s hybrid and remote work environment where your remote employees are more vulnerable, following the zero trust model is the best option.

Protect The Master Copy of Your Code

When you are creating a software, you have a master copy of it. Make sure it is backed up on secure media somewhere else. Use a file integrity management tool before sending your master copy of data to the production department. Make sure you compare the master copy with another copy of data and ensure that there are no discrepancies between the two versions. This will help you in identifying changes that attackers might have made. It is important to make sure that the physical image is completely secure before distributing the software.

Keep An Eye On Your Software Development Environment

Security experts suggest that you should create a baseline and then constantly monitor your software development environment for changes. If you find changes that are diverting too much away from the baseline, you should take immediate action. Creating and maintaining logs of all the activities can also come in handy in detecting malicious behavior.

Since these activities are reported early, you have more time to react and respond to the situation. Unfortunately, businesses that don’t have constant monitoring enabled know about such incidents when the damage has already been done. As a result, they can not do anything about it except for cursing themselves for not having logging mechanisms in place. 

If you don’t want to bear the brunt of lack of monitoring, you need to establish a round the clock logging system, which can alert you of any malicious activity taking place on your network. This allows you to take immediate action and fix the issue before it is too late.

Safeguard Your Test Data

One type of data that most organizations ignore is test data. They focus so much on securing the network and hosting environments that they neglect security of the test data. Sometimes, it can contain some sensitive information related to the production environment which can fall into the wrong hands. In fact, it can also contain some personal information as well as transaction information.

Since the data from production reaches the development team without any modification, the risk is higher. That is why it is imperative to secure that data through encryption. This will keep your critical data secure and private and threat actors can not read or steal that data and use it to their advantage.

What steps do you take to secure your software development environment? Share it with us in the comments section below.

By Anurag Rathod

Anurag Rathod is an Editor of Appclonescript.com, who is passionate for app-based startup solutions and on-demand business ideas. He believes in spreading tech trends. He is an avid reader and loves thinking out of the box to promote new technologies.