Backend security is the defense against potential cyberthreats and unauthorized access to a system’s server-side components, such as databases, applications, and servers. Prioritizing backend security is crucial for safeguarding confidential information and averting cyberattacks that may compromise a system’s integrity.
Putting strong security measures in place can help businesses protect their reputation and business operations by maintaining the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of their backend systems.
With that in mind, let’s dive into the backend security topics to learn more about the common risks and steps to protect your backend from cyber attacks.
What Is Backend Security?
Backend security refers to the procedures used to ensure the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of an application’s data and resources. It prevents unauthorized access, malicious attacks, and data breaches.
A standard web application consists of two parts: the front end and the backend.
The front end of the application is what the public can see. Users can browse and interact with the platform via its front end. In contrast, the backend is where the applications’ servers are located. It includes the technical components that keep the application running.
Backend security risks include data injection, which occurs when cyber attackers send a query to your system in order to retrieve sensitive data, and access control misconfigurations, which can result in unauthorised system access.
To prevent these, it’s important to ensure that your backend applications don’t accept or process inputs from unauthorised and unverified sources. You should also constantly examine your access control levels to ensure that all parties using your web applications have the appropriate level of access.
Before we get into the specifics of backend security, there is another backend system framework that can help you secure your system. These are the microservices architectures; learn more about them in our article, “Backend Microservices Architecture: Key to Agile, Scalable and Resilient Systems“.
The Importance of Backend Security
The importance of backend security cannot be overstated, as a breach can result in severe consequences such as data loss, financial loss, and reputational damage. Implementing strong security measures and remaining vigilant against potential threats is critical for protecting your backend applications and the sensitive data they hold.
The majority of backend systems store sensitive data, such as user information, transaction details, and proprietary business data. This makes data protection extremely important for a business, as a breach can have a significant impact not only on customer trust but also on the business as a whole.
Security breaches can also result in significant downtime, which disrupts operations. As the saying goes, time is money, so downtime is unacceptable for a business because it can have a significant impact on revenue. That is why backend security is important, as it contributes to the continuous availability of applications.
Furthermore, data breaches can result in significant financial losses and damage to a company’s reputation, making it critical for businesses to prioritise backend security in order to comply with data protection laws and avoid legal penalties in multiple jurisdictions.
5 Common Backend Security Risks
Given how quickly cyberattacks are evolving, backend security may be infinitely risky. However, several attacks are more common than the others. Many common backend security risks are described in the Security Trails blog; however, these 5 have a higher likelihood.
Risk 1: Data Injection
Injection attacks can be used against the backend of your web application in the same way that they can impact the front end.
Attackers can create queries on the backend of your web application, and if you don’t have any safeguards in place to confirm where the query came from, they can execute commands directly on your backend, which normally would have been filtered and stopped by the frontend. One efficient method of preventing data injection attacks is to secure your backend so that it cannot accept inputs from unauthorised sources.
Risk 2: Lack of authentication security
Multiple services with authentication requirements make up web application backends.
Logins are required for databases and console/OS level access, and all of these services operate directly on the operating system layer. As a result, keeping authentication security strong is essential; otherwise, any vulnerability that infiltrates the system could compromise the entire operating system. For instance, employing HTTP authentication in development areas, limiting logins to specific users or IP addresses, or utilising automated brute force detection systems (which automatically ban offending IP addresses) are all very helpful when it comes to the web server.
Risk 3: Misconfigurations in Access Control-Related
Access control levels, or ACLs, are a feature of web applications that are often disregarded. ACLs specify which areas of a backend a client or team member can access. Errors in this domain may allow clients or colleagues to access private areas of your online application.
ACL misconfigurations can also, in many other situations, result in targeted attacks where compromised team members’ systems are used to gain access to private sections of your web application. When managing the security of your web application, it’s critical to make sure that both your customers and team members have the appropriate level of access.
Risk 4: Misconfigurations in Software
The front end of your website depends on its back end to handle user input processing and heavy lifting.
Therefore, if there are any backend configuration errors, the user may be presented with sensitive information. For instance, when configuring software, error messages and error handling in general are commonly disregarded. These error messages occasionally include sensitive information, such as variable names and data paths, which can direct attackers to these files and variables.
It is strongly advised that you set up the software that manages and runs your backend, such as your webserver, coding language, or run-time handler like PHP, so that it does not display sensitive error messages to the user.
The risk of DoS attacks is another misconfiguration hazard.
These attacks aim to deplete system resources by exploiting software that is misconfigured and lacks resource limitations. The web application may behave oddly after the system’s resources are depleted, with the base operating system terminating any process that it sees fitting. This might result in the web server crashing while the database is still active or the database crashing while the web server is still running. Customers and end users would both have a bad experience in either case.
Risk 5: Outdated Software or System Components
Any web application requires multiple software components to function, with web servers, databases, and other software helping to improve performance.
The security of every single application needs to be taken into account with all these pieces of software in use. For instance, if your web server is weak, it may expose sensitive areas of your web application by accepting user input. This could make your entire web application weak.
Having any out-of-date or end-of-life software component on the public internet is extremely risky. This is especially true now that users can use tools like Shodan to look for servers that are running particular software versions. If you are using out-of-date or end-of-life software, this can make you and your web application a simple target.
How to Secure Your Backend from Cyber Attacks
Protecting sensitive data and maintaining the continuity of your business operations depend on the security of your backend against cyberattacks. Regular security audits can reduce the possibility of cyberattacks. Moreover, multi-factor authentication and encryption can be used to further improve the security of your backend system.
Aside from that, here are some necessary steps to improve backend security:
- Data Injection Prevention: Ensure that your backend applications don’t accept or process inputs from unauthorised and unverified sources. This can help block requests from unverified sources.
- Access Control: Regularly examine your Access Control Levels (ACLs) to ensure that all parties using your web applications have the right level of access. Misconfigurations in your ACLs could cause unauthorized access to your system.
- Use HTTPS: Implement HTTPS instead of HTTP to encrypt the data transmitted between the client and server. Also, implement secure headers, such as HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), to enforce the use of HTTPS.
- Data Encryption: Encrypt all data at rest and use secure getaways or SSL for data in transit. Limit access to only legitimate users by enforcing key-based encryption.
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): MFA allows the system to ensure that there is no identity theft involved. It adds an extra layer of security by requiring multiple forms of verification.
- Automate Data Backups: Regular data backups can help recover information in case of a data breach.
- SSL Certificate: Get an SSL certificate for your website to establish a secure connection between a web server and a browser.
- Professional Help: Consider hiring professionals to monitor your website’s security.
This is all you need to know about backend security. Aside from security, performance is an important aspect of the backend system. But how do you optimize it? Learn more in our article, “Backend Best Practices. 7 Things to Do for Performance Optimisation“.
Conclusion
Within the context of cybersecurity measures, backend security is important. Organisations can protect their sensitive data, applications, and digital operations from potential harm by strengthening their backend infrastructure against cyber threats through effective security measures and an understanding of common risks.
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