New research reveals APAC’s biggest application security challenges

The state of application security in 2021

Businesses are facing an array of challenges when it comes to application security. Over the years, web applications have been rising steadily as the top attack vector for breaches — and the move to remote work in 2020 intensified this shift. Many organizations had to expose internal applications to the internet, and a significant number had to rapidly lift and shift applications to the cloud.

As part of this survey, we asked organizations about the number of times they were breached in the past year as a direct result of a vulnerability in one of their applications, and the worldwide average was two breaches in the past 12 months.

Respondents stated that the vast majority of these attacks were due to web application vulnerabilities. Bot attacks, struggles with API security, and software supply chain attacks are among the main contributing factors to these breaches. Survey respondents readily admit that significant improvements are required in all three areas — and while there were some interesting regional and sub-regional differences, the trends were very similar globally

Methodology

Barracuda commissioned independent market researcher Vanson Bourne to conduct a global survey of 750 application security decision makersresponsible for their organization’s application development and security. Survey participants from the U.S., Europe and APAC represented organizations with 500 or more employees globally. Since IT responsibilities and cybersecurity threats vary by region, respondents from a variety of job functions and industry sectors were surveyed, to get an understanding of application security risks from multiple perspectives. The survey was fielded in March and April 2021.