Most businesses today rely on websites to interact with customers, sell its products and deliver services to the customers. Frameworks like Zend, Asp.Net MVC, Symfony, SharePoint etc. are used for developing robust web applications. WordPress plays an important role in highly customized websites with easy content management. Those into eCommerce businesses turn to platforms like Magento. Apart from these specific needs, there are numerous other functions that a website and web application used for delivering the best solution to the visitors. These applications are delivered through web browsers and there and this trend is increasing day by day. And so are the application security vulnerabilities. Hackers and cybercriminals are in luck these days.

According to a study done by HP across its offices, it was found that 69% of the total scanned web applications of the company had at least one SQL injection error. It was also found that 42% contained a cross-site scripting vulnerability. The hackers never leave a single opportunity to get inside your application and exploit it to their advantage. They are even equipped with automated attack tools which makes it easy for them to break into an application.

Therefore, it is important businesses take the security aspect of their application seriously. While it might take a little longer to develop a security system for your web applications, there are a few basic things that a business can do to avoid security hazards. These are:

• Avoid user-supplied content like text, images or any kind of uploadable attachment. Such data can be used by a hacker to break into your application.
• Keep an eye on top vulnerabilities that are affecting the web application security at the current time. The web applications can then be checked to see if these vulnerabilities might compromise them or not.
• The first step towards securing a web application can be to thoroughly understand the security controls of the language on which the applications are built on.
• Hackers are in search of that one place which is not secured. Therefore, it is important to apply security control throughout the development of an application.
• It is better to make some else right the security control for your application. Because you are someone who doesn't study security, then it is possible that you might make an assumption and miss something.

These are just a few basic steps and applying these steps you can reduce the risk to a great extent. But it is important for any business to understand the defensive strategies to protect their existing applications from hackers as well as to build more secure ones in the future. For that one needs to keep a check on the vulnerabilities regularly.