Managing risk with application security

Security bugs and vulnerabilities are in themselves not news. What is news is that, as other lines of attack are closed to hackers through use of point solutions, such as anti-virus control, hackers are turning their attention to the remaining vulnerabilities that they can exploit - those in software applications. The fact that organisations are increasingly relying on software applications - including those that they write themselves or packaged applications in which they modify some of the code - makes them increasingly vulnerable to hacker attacks. According to Fran Howarth , a principal analyst at business and IT analyst firm Quocirca, more than two-thirds of respondents to a recent survey of 250 organisations in Germany, the UK and the US cite software development as being critical or very important to their businesses, yet most are not doing enough to build security into their applications.