Over Half of Companies Suffered a Web Application Security Breach in the Last 18 Months

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Coverity, Inc., the development testing leader, today announced the results of "The Software Security Risk Report," a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Coverity, to examine application security and testing practices. According to the study, web application security incidents have become increasingly common and expensive, with the majority of companies responding to the study experiencing at least one breach in the last 18 months and many companies losing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars as a result. At the same time, the study found that the majority of companies have yet to implement secure development practices, most often citing time-to-market pressures, funding and the lack of appropriate technologies suitable for use during development as their primary roadblocks.

Based on a survey of 240 North American and European software development influencers from companies that develop web applications, "The Software Security Risk Report" reveals:

• Security incidents are prevalent and expensive: According to the survey, just over half (51 percent) of respondents had at least one web application security incident in the prior 18 months. Among those reporting incidents, 18 percent put their losses at more than $500,000 while another 8 percent saw losses in excess of $1 million. Two reported losses of more than $10 million.
• Code volumes, business demands sideline security: A vast majority of the respondents who experienced a breach said they lack the right security technologies suitable for development (71 percent), that security processes cannot scale with the volume of code they produce (79 percent), and that they lack the funding to invest in security (71 percent). Almost half of all respondents (41 percent) said time-to-market pressures prevented them from pushing security into development.
• Too few companies employ secure development practices: Less than half (42 percent) of respondents follow secure coding guidelines, only 28 percent use a library of approved or banned functions and barely a quarter (26 percent) utilize threat modeling. Additionally, only 17 percent test during the development cycle and more than half do not audit their code before integration testing.
• Developers struggle with legacy security tools: According to developers surveyed, the top three challenges to working with current web application security tools include the lack of integration with their current development environment, the need for too much security expertise and high false positives. By comparison, some security practitioners agreed that integration was a primary challenge, but none believed security tools were complex or required too much expertise to use.

As companies grapple with a more sophisticated threat landscape, they will have no choice but to improve application security. If development does not integrate security into its practices from the earliest stages, addressing it later may not only be more expensive, but could be ineffective altogether.

"It's clear that security practitioners and developers aren't speaking the same language when it comes to application security, and this is leading to very costly consequences for companies," said Jennifer Johnson, VP of Marketing at Coverity. "Application security begins and ends with development. Developers need to be part of the solution but the industry won't solve the problem until security is incorporated into the development process with technologies and processes that developers can understand and adopt. Force-feeding development with legacy tools built for security teams just isn't working."

Online Resources

• Download a full copy of "The Software Security Risk Report."
• Attend a CSO Online webinar on September 19 featuring Chenxi Wang, Ph.D., Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc.
• Visit the Coverity Security Research Laboratory blog.

About Coverity
Coverity, Inc., (www.coverity.com), the leader in development testing, is the trusted standard for companies that need to protect their brands and bottom lines from software failures. More than 1,100 Coverity customers use Coverity's development testing suite of products to automatically test source code for software defects that could lead to product crashes, unexpected behavior, security breaches, or catastrophic failure. Coverity is a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco. Coverity is funded by Foundation Capital and Benchmark Capital. Follow us on Twitter or check out our blog.

SOURCE Coverity, Inc.