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Secure Code: The Simple Answer to Protecting Web Applications from Injection Attacks

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Web development can be a tough job. A company’s web apps are often the most visible presence that they have on the Internet, and it’s the developer’s job to ensure that they work and work well. User experience research has demonstrated that seconds matter on a website – if you load too slowly or have a non-intuitive user interface, that can cost you major sales. The bottom line is that a lot of work needs to go into balancing functionality, efficiency, and design.

protecting web apps from injections
Injection Attacks

And, oh yeah, that web app also needs to be secure. Many, many webpages are designed to let anyone log in and interact with it, and often have a connection to a database that stores at least some type of sensitive information. Under the EU’s General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR), the definition of “sensitive” user data has become pretty broad (even an email address counts) and the penalties are fairly stiff (4% of global turnover or 20 million euros, whichever is greater).

When dealing with web application security, one of the biggest threats that developers face is user input. You put a form field in a webpage and tell them that it’s for a phone number. 99% of people will only try to enter a phone number, but it’s that 1% that you have to watch out for. Mistakes in developing user interfaces can lead to compromises and are why we need web application firewalls (WAF).

Unexpected Input

Entering deliberately malicious input into an application is called an injection attack, and it’s one of the biggest threats that application developers face (consistently included on the OWASP Top Ten list of web application vulnerabilities). Today, over half of the attacks against web applications are injection attacks. More specifically, they are SQL injection attacks, meaning that the attackers are trying to access and steal data from your database.

SQL injection attacks (and injection attacks in general) exploit poor user input validation and how developers use this user input. SQL is a language for creating queries to a database, and it uses a single quote (‘) as a delimiter for user-provided input. For example, a valid SQL statement that takes user input may look like:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE name=’ ”+username+” ’

The purpose of this statement is to find all records in the user’s database where the username matches the value provided by the user and stored in username. The application developer expects an input like bob, which would produce the following statement:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE name=’bob’

This statement would produce the desired behavior of finding the record for user bob in the database, which allows the web application to load bob’s account. However, not all users are well-behaved.

One way to break this statement is to provide a username ‘ OR ‘1’=’1. The SQL statement that this would create is the following: SELECT * FROM users WHERE ‘’ OR ‘1’=’1’. Since 1 always equals 1, this statement will resolve to true for every record in the database, allowing the attacker to access the user data of everyone on the website.

This is only one example of an SQL injection attack on a web application. Alternatives include bypassing logins by providing a username and then using this attack on a password field so that the attacker can access a specific account. Without the appropriate protections in place, these sorts of attacks can lead to reportable (and fineable) breaches. Also, Read 7 Types of Network Attacks to Watch Out For in 2020.

Anti-Injection Defenses

The simple answer to protecting web applications from injection attack is writing secure code. The primary assumption made when performing this type of attack is that the user is capable of providing input that includes the single quote (‘) character that is passed unchecked into the SQL statement.

Blocking any user input that includes a single quote character would protect against this type of attack. If the open quote coming before user input is not closed, anything that is located between the opening and closing quote is considered the field to search for in the database. You may end up looking for a user with a very weird name, but your database will remain secure. The issue with this approach is that it assumes that the developer identifies and properly protects every possible means by which the attacker can enter user input. People make mistakes sometimes, and it’s wise to have some automated defenses in place to help prevent this type of attack.

Preventing injection attacks (and many other types of attacks) is what web application firewalls (WAFs) are designed to do. Protecting against the OWASP Top Ten is a bare minimum for a WAF, and some provide additional, advanced functionality like anomaly detection designed to detect new types of attacks against your website. Your web presence is the public face of your business, and it’s always worth the investment to protect it.

Protecting Your Web Apps

Web applications are an extremely useful and valuable way for organizations to interact with their customers, but they can be very dangerous as well. Many of these applications provide a direct connection between the user and a database that contains information protected under data privacy regulations. Avoiding costly penalties and loss of face requires protecting this data properly.

Secure programming practices are a good start when developing web applications, but the fact that we still have an OWASP Top Ten list of web application vulnerabilities demonstrates that they’re not always followed. Deploying a strong web application firewall should be a component of every organization’s cybersecurity strategy to help protect the public face of their business.

The 5 Most important Steps in Software Development

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Whether you want to start learning how to create software for yourself or you want to familiarize yourself with the software development process, you should familiarize yourself with the software creation process. There are a few steps each piece of successful software goes through during the creation process, which ensures quality and functionality. This article is a non-exhaustive list of the most important steps, why they are important, and how you can carry them out.  

Research and Requirement Gathering

An extremely important step, especially for more complex tasks, a successful software development process needs a lot of research and information gathering before even one line of code is written.

If you want a software solution for professional purposes, such as launching an online market or expanding your business’s operations, it is extremely hard to get the software development right – what operations are necessary for the program to perform? How can it facilitate communication between different people using it? How crucial is each operation and what is the cost of failure? These are just a few of the questions you need to know the answer of before outsourcing it to software developers to start working on the software solution or creating it yourself.

If you don’t know the answer to these questions, you’ll quickly find out that the finished product is missing a few key functions, some of the operations aren’t up to your standards while other operations are being over-polished, and you will have difficulty adapting the software to your growing business as time goes on.

Prototyping

Next step in the process is prototyping – since the father of philosophy, man has realized that language is an imperfect vehicle for communication, and misunderstanding is bound to happen, but the purpose of a good software development plan is to minimize misunderstandings, and more importantly, minimize the cost resulting from it. Imagine spending a lot of man-hours trying to come up with an excellent software requirements specification (SRS), and then you proceeded to spend a lot of time, effort, and money developing the software program. If at the end of all this, you found out that there was a fundamental misunderstanding between you and the client, you’d lose a ton of money and, potentially, a very angry client that might leave a bad review for your software development agency.

Prototyping is the answer to all these problems – you can create a barebones version of the software solution that includes some of the key features and displays the looks-and-feels of the program and presents it to the client. If you get the go-ahead, then you can start developing the software extensively.

Extensive Development

If you are commissioning a software development agency to create the software for you, you don’t have to worry at all about this stage. You’ll probably hear from the agency a couple of times about some details, but other than that, unless you want to be more involved in the process, you’ll just have to wait for the software solution to finish.

On the other hand, if you’re the one developing the software, this is the longest and most technically demanding part of the process:

  • You need to make sure you follow the SRS when creating the software.
  • Keep flexibility and extensibility in mind – most clients want features added and changed over time, and you need to plan for this by following accepted software development practices and code in such a way that you can easily extend the software solution’s function in the future.

Testing

While it is impossible to weed out all the bugs and mistakes in a software program, especially a big one, it is important to conduct sufficient tests to ensure all the main functionalities work as intended.

One smart way to approach this is by coming up with the list of functions the software solution is intended to perform and then sorting them from the most important functions to the least important. Focus on the functionality at the top of the list and ensure everything is okay there because bugs and mistakes there could cause much more damage.

Release and Marketing

This section is only for those developers who want to release their software solutions to the public, and if you’re one of them, you need to know how to advertise for your software solution and let potential clients know you have a solution for their problems.

You can start by creating a website, posting about your software solution on forums, and buying some ad space for it where some potentially interested people might see it. Although, these take a lot of time to bear fruit, and software engineers are notoriously bad at marketing, so you are fighting an uphill battle.

If you find out you are not having any success marketing on your own, you can always hire an SEO agency like Neadoo Digital SEO agency to help you rank first in Google searches making a lot of people find out about you!

Asus 6Z, the First Completely Bezel-Less Screen Phone from the Series Launched in India at Rs 31,999

Curmudgeon
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From the Taiwanese pioneer brand, today, Asus 6Z has been announced in India as the successor to the last year’s Zenfone 5Z.

Asus 6Z which is referred to as Zenfone 6 in other markets is available in three variants:

  • 6GB of RAM and 64GB of onboard storage at Rs 31,999
  • 6GB of RAM and 128GB of onboard storage at Rs 34,999
  • 8GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard storage at Rs 39,999

This is the first smartphone in the series that has a complete bezel-less screen. Asus 6Z has a 6.4 inches IPS LCD display with an aspect ratio of 19.5:9, pixel density of 403 ppi, and HDR10 video playback. The display delivers an 83.8% screen to body percentage. It is designed with an aluminium chassis in the middle sandwiched by Corning Gorilla Glass 6 on both the ends.

The main highlight of the smartphone is the flip-up camera. To achieve the bezel-less screen, Asus 6Z features a rotating camera where the rear camera can be flipped to convert it into an amazing selfie shooter. It houses two rear cameras- a 48MP primary camera with a sensor from Sony (IMX586) which is paired with an f/1.79 aperture lens, and 1.6-micron pixel size along with a 13MP ultra-wide secondary camera that has a real-time distortion correction which can fix the barrel distortion. The motorized flip camera module allows the users to take some interesting clicks in various transitions.

Asus 6Z runs on Android 9 Pie based custom Zen UI software and packs in the top-end Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 processor which promises an enhanced CPU and GPU performance. It is available in three variants with a maximum of 8GB of RAM with 256GB of internal storage. The onboard storage can be further expanded with a dedicated microSD card.

Unlike its predecessor, Asus 6Z doesn’t have the screen notch. It has a capacitive sensing fingerprint reader which is mounted in the back just below the camera module. Asus 6Z has been backed up by a huge 5000mAh battery which can last up to two days and it comes with a 40W charger which supports Qualcomm’s Quick Charging 4.0 standard. The handset has a triple slot to house a memory card and two SIM cards.

Further, the phone also features two stereo speakers with two smart amplifiers which offer exceptional sound quality. When it comes to connectivity features, the smartphone includes Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth v5.0, NFC, 4G VoLTE, FM radio, GPS, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Key Specifications:

  • Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855
  • Android v9.0 (Pie)
  • 6.4-inches(16.26 cm) NanoEdge display with a resolution of 1080×2340 pixels
  • 600 nits peak brightness
  • 5,000mAh battery
  • Quick Charge 4.0
  • 48 MP + 13 MP Dual Primary Cameras with dual LED Flash, HDR, and auto panorama

Asus 6Z will be available in two colour variants-Midnight Black and Twilight Silver on Flipkart from June 26 of this month.

How Payment Integrations Can Transform Your Retail Business

Sreejesh
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If you want to run an efficient retail store, payment integrations are a necessity. Integrations essentially ensure that payments are smoothly processed from one medium to another. For example, from your POS system to your payment processing software. With effective payment integrations, you’ll find the checkout process is simpler and smoother, and customers are overall more satisfied with their shopping experience. Keep reading to learn just how important payment integrations are in retail.

Seamless Shopping

What retail stores do you frequent, and why do you frequent them? The answer is likely not only because those stores stock your favourite products or brands, but because shopping there is easy and quick. The checkout process is efficient, and you’re able to get out the door quickly once you’re finished shopping.

A clean, simple checkout process makes all the difference in a retail store. If you’ve ever stood in a long line waiting on a credit card to process, you know exactly what we mean. This can quickly turn your great shopping spree into a frustrating engagement or can cause you to leave the store altogether.

Now picture that moment as a customer at your own store. How would you feel? Payment integration makes the payment process go smoother, integrating all of your systems fluently and creating a checkout process that’s error-free and efficient.

High Sales Volumes

Having a system that can handle high sales volumes is also a critical component of an efficient store. When you have lines out the door, you need to get through them quickly, which can mean a heavy strain on the system.

When your POS system and payment processing software aren’t integrated properly, you’ll find that crashes or errors will occur more frequently with longer lines. POS software for retail stores usually has seamless integration as a standard, meaning it can handle the larger loads of high-volume sales days.

Better Insights With Analytics Tools

When your POS software integrates well with payment processing, you have access to better information through the POS’s analytics software. Accurate numbers can help you make some pretty important decisions, as well as get a good picture of how your business is actually performing.

Analytics are some of the greatest tools a business can have at its disposal. Sales numbers, foot traffic numbers, and more provide incredible insight not only into customer behaviour and purchasing habits but how your staffing and inventory are affecting the way your store is run.

You can also track your inventory in a more efficient way with your POS system, eliminating errors and identifying problem areas (or employees). Employee theft and shoplifting are still two of the biggest factors in retail losses, so effectively tracking inventory is a must for any retail store.

Easier Returns Process

Have you ever purchased something from a store, only to go back to return it and the transaction “doesn’t exist” in the store’s system? This can either be due to the date of the purchase (you can’t return something a year later and expect a credit) or due to some error in the system itself.

This can occur when the POS system isn’t integrated properly with the payment processing software. The transaction can become lost in the system or completely deleted, leaving you frustrated and unable to return your item.

Don’t leave your customers in limbo with a frustrating or ineffective returns process. Ensure your software is integrated properly, and that it’s tracking sales properly. This also ensures accurate inventory counts when a return is completed. Check Digital Money and the Future of Payment.

Building Reputation For Quality Service

A successful business is entirely dependent on the customer’s interpretation of their customer service. If the overall interpretation is good, that business is said to have excellent customer service and is a trusted retailer. Good customer service is about more than simply engaging your customers on the sales floor.

When your checkout process is simple and seamless, your customers will appreciate you for taking their time seriously. Good customer service means respecting every aspect of the customer’s needs, right down to the checkout process. That’s why payment integrations are crucial to your overall customer service reputation.

Fewer Mistakes = Lower Costs

Mistakes are costly. By cutting down on payment mistakes, long lines, and other payment-related issues, you’ll be saving time and money. Payment integrations ensure the payment process is as error-free as possible, to the advantage of both your business and the customer.

If you find payment integration to be a challenge with your current software, it may be a good time to research other options to include in your business. A simple change like adding new software can drastically improve your checkout process and the business as a whole.

Fewer mistakes also improve your reputation and can put you a step ahead of the competition, which is critical for growth. Without growth, your business could end up becoming stagnant and you may never reach your business goals. Remember to put the customers first, and always focus on creating a simple, stress and error-free shopping experience.

Conclusion

Payment integration is a crucial component of an efficient business and checkout process. Be sure to choose software that either integrates well with your POS system or is connected to a POS system of its own for maximum compatibility. There are hundreds of POS systems out there, so you’re sure to find one that can meet your business’s specific needs!

4 Pitfalls to Avoid During Digital Transformation

Sreejesh
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Source: Pixabay.com

Digital transformation is one of the biggest buzzwords in enterprise tech today. But while digital transformation is necessary for business survival, many transformation initiatives fail. In extremely rare instances, the cause of transformation failure is beyond the organization’s control.

However, in the overwhelming majority of cases, it comes down to avoidable mistakes. Companies can steer clear of these mistakes by not only contracting a digital transformation consultancy like WGroup IT consultants but also circumventing the pitfalls that could curtail their ability to execute a transformation project. Here’s a look at the most common pitfalls.

Excessive Focus on Digital

It goes without saying that a big part of digital transformation revolves around technology. Nevertheless, there’s a danger of getting so engrossed in getting the digital aspect right that one could ignore some critical non-tech components that ensure transformation success. Companies that focus on simply acquiring the latest tech, jumping on the hottest bandwagon, and following what they see everyone else doing are at greatest risk of hitting a brick wall in their attempt at digital transformation.

Rather, there must be a clear and well-thought-out sense of purpose that drives the search for and selection of technology that’s going to deliver the most value to the organization. Enterprises should avoid running multiple transformation projects at the same time. This can stretch resources, introduce conflict, complicate project control, unnecessarily increase technology costs, and ultimately doom the digital transformation effort to failure.

Poor Communication

Of non-tech ingredients for digital transformation success, few are as important as communication. Transformation is inherently a company-wide undertaking. That means it comes down to the ability to marshal teams and individuals toward the achievement of this shared objective. This cannot happen without good communication.

Organizations must pull everyone to the same page as far as what the goals of each project are. Projects must be perceived as organized, purposeful, and needed in order to fire up the morale of all employees. In the absence of good, consistent, and coherent communication, the transformation project will run into numerous hurdles and eventually collapse.

Digital transformation is about change management. It’s about adjusting the mindset of employees into accepting new ways of doing things. It’s about getting them out of their comfort zone. If the communication around the digital transformation project isn’t clear and persuasive, you are going to run into far more resistance than is necessary.

Working in Silos

There’s hardly any organization that sets out to create the silos that often form barriers between departments. Silos develop over time and are the result of departments getting too absorbed in the realization of their own goals to see the bigger picture. But silos do not just affect departments — they can also impair digital transformation.

Whether it’s a single enterprise-wide project or multiple projects running in parallel, companies must always think about each transformation project in the context of the entire company. The transformation that is solely focused on a single process or department will be hamstrung as the organization won’t be as invested in the project’s success as it should.

For example, if a transformation project takes place solely within the marketing department, then the project could fail because the IT department wasn’t informed in order to ensure the systems that the marketing unit depends on are aligned with the transformation.

Absence of Re-Skilling

Digital transformation is a medium to long term undertaking that may run for two to three years. And it makes sense because if transformation is executed too fast, the resulting disruption of processes may be counterproductive. But even more important in this 2 to 3-year timeframe is that it takes time to re-skill employees.

New systems may be required, certain job roles may be merged, and some positions could be rendered redundant. The skills your employees currently have that are a perfect fit for the digital ecosystem today may be woefully inadequate in the new work environment. If staff aren’t re-skilled in the months and years leading up to the transition, it’s going to be pretty difficult to make the transformation to yield the desired results.

The pace of technological innovation has made it hard for many companies to keep up with customer demands and competitor action. That’s why digital transformation is something every business must be prepared to do.

Why Links Are the Key to SEO

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It’s no secret that search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for businesses in today’s environment. Even the smallest local businesses must stay on top of their search engine rankings for relevant queries and their presence on popular GPS and map apps. How SEO actually works, though, is a little less widely known.

A lot goes into SEO, of course. The text on your website certainly matters. That’s where you’ll want to use keywords and keyword phrases just often enough to nail the proper keyword density and move up the rankings. HTML coding decisions matter, too. It’s your chance to tell search engine programs whether or not to read certain links, for instance, and it’s a great place to stash more keywords within the metadata and filenames that your site requires.

But one factor looms larger than all others in SEO. It’s the factor that’s been most important from the very beginning, and remains central to any effective SEO strategy. We are talking, of course, about links.

Links are how search engines work

For evidence of the importance of links, look no further than the very structure of search engines themselves. Search engines use algorithms to determine the ranking of results. No search engine can function without knowing what sites are out there and what they contain. To find out, search engines use programs called “spiders” or “web crawlers” to move around the internet collecting information and cataloging sites. Links are how these web crawlers get around the internet.

In the old days, links were virtually all-important to search engine algorithms. Things have gotten quite a bit more complicated than that, but Google and the rest of the search engine gang still value links with great importance. Of course, how much links will help your site will depend on a few crucial factors. To help google crawl your links it is important to make sure your site is accessible to google bots all the time, ensuring uptime is as important as any other factor, sites with faster performance and fewer downtime will significantly boost SEO and traffic.

How links work in SEO

When search engine web crawlers check out your page and the links going to and from it, they take note of the details. Depending on what sorts of links are going to your website, Google may consider your website very important or not important at all.

If Google thinks highly of a website, then it tends to think highly of links coming from it. The better the website, the more a link from it to your website will help your website in the eyes of Google. “Link spamming” from lousy sites is a very bad idea, but a smart link-building strategy that focuses on high-quality domains can be extremely effective in improving SEO. The experts use a metric called “domain authority” to measure the importance and authority of sites around the net. While we don’t know exactly what Google thinks of every website, we can make educated guesses and use what we know to boost the SEO of a given site.

The actual wording of the link matters, too. Linked text helps Google determine what your site is all about. If the linked text happens to include a keyword you’re aiming to rank for, that’s great news. Conversely, SEO experts tend to avoid using target keywords in links going away from their site because it would be counterproductive.

An ideal link from an SEO perspective would be a link coming to your site from a high-authority domain with the linked text being or including a keyword or keyword phrase that you want your site to rank for. Andm, landing links like this is exactly what the best link building services do.

Yes, there are link building services — you can’t expect lots of other sites to link to you without good reason. That’s why it makes sense for small business owners to outsource digital marketing and SEO to pros who understand the importance of links, and who know how to get the best ones for your site.

5 Advanced Link Building Strategies to Advance Your Campaign

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Getting links to your content is necessary to help your website gain authority and is important for SEO campaign management. Links also help bring more traffic to your website. Most importantly, to get good quality links, you have to be creating content that people want to link to. Great content and services can help you get links without even having to ask. There are plenty of different link building strategies you can use, but some are more effective than others. Getting your links from authoritative and reputable sites is also important.

Here are 5 link building strategies that you can use to earn more links.

Guest blogging

Guest blogging is a popular way to get links to your site. To get started in guest blogging, you need to find a blog in your niche and reach out to them. In your post, you can include relevant links to your website. This is also a bonus for them because they’ll be getting more content for free. Many blogs will advertise if they want someone to write a guest post, but often times you can reach out to them regardless of whether or not they say they’re looking for guest bloggers. If you offer a great article to them for free, there’s a good chance they won’t turn it down.

Unlinked mentions

People don’t always include links to your website when they reference it. This can be annoying if you don’t catch it, but you’re already a step in the right direction. All you have to do now is to reach out to the person who mentioned you. If you reach out to the person who already thought you were relevant and had something to offer, there’s no reason they shouldn’t want to link to you.

Broken link building

Like finding unlinked mentions, finding broken links is an easy way that you can earn more links. There’s a good chance that at some point you’ve clicked on a link that didn’t work. This can be annoying and hurts user experience. If you find a broken link that’s similar to something you already have, or something you can quickly create it, you can ask to have it replaced with yours. Someone using a broken link will likely be happy to replace it with a working one in order to improve user experience.

Replacing links from inferior pages

You can find links to tons of articles that make you wonder why anyone thought they were good enough to be linked to. If you have a better piece of content that covers a similar topic, you can introduce it to them. Relevant content that’s a better quality can also provide more to the person who linked it. This is especially helpful if the inferior link is to your competition’s site.

Create different types of content

While you might already have blog posts or service pages that are good to be linked to, trying something different can help you stand out from the competition. Infographics, videos, and podcasts are all popular and can help get you a lot of links if you provide interesting information. This can even be less work than you might think if you repurpose your older content.

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