The Security Innovation Europe Blog

As with all programming languages, PHP has a unique set of uses, idiosyncrasies and, crucially, security vulnerabilities. In order to effectively train developers in the best practices of secure PHP development, your organisation needs to build upon the basic tenets of developer training, and implement a security training program specific to PHP.

To help you develop a comprehensive training program for your developers, we’re looking at the fundamental elements needed to train secure PHP developers.

Developer security training is crucial for securing your latest software and web applications, and protecting your organisation. Unfortunately, not all training courses are created equal – and sometimes, training can struggle to engage developers.

To help you choose the right developer security training, we’re looking at five of the most common developer security training complaints – and looking at how you can resolve them.

Whilst many organisations recognise the need to train their software developers in security, expensive and ineffective training programs are relatively commonplace.

In order to ensure your software developers can improve their security knowledge in an efficient and cost-effective way, it’s important to avoid the five software developer training mistakes most organisations make.

Sharing sensitive data is a business necessity. Whilst the importance of internal data security is growing in prominence, few organisations are applying the same rigorous principles to the people and businesses that can also access your information.

In order to protect your data, both inside your organisation and out, it’s essential that you understand how to secure your data supply chain.

There are myriad factors that can influence when new software and software updates are released.

Often, release schedules are determined in response to software-hungry consumers, competitor strategies, or the increasing pace of hardware development. Whilst some of these pressures are very real, and require a response, other factors may be based on assumptions – be it the expected desires of the end user, or the expected release strategies of a rival organisation.

In some instances, these pressures can result in aggressive software release management. Software and software updates are pushed forward, and released over an extremely short time frame. Whilst rapid software iteration can be a valuable marketing tool, it can also pose some real security issues.

Whether its customer payment information, employee data or strategic business intelligence, all organisations handle some form of sensitive information.

In order to protect that information, and ensure that it never enters the public domain, it’s essential to take steps to secure your company’s sensitive data.

Software applications are susceptible to a diverse array of different vulnerabilities. With each vulnerability posing a unique set of problems, it can be difficult for development teams to decide on the right course of action. In order to balance the benefits of fixing a vulnerability with the costs of doing so, it’s essential for organisations to be able to prioritise software vulnerabilities.

Software vulnerabilities are a fact of life, and it’s near impossible to eradicate all vulnerabilities from your code. As a result, the goal of developers, security professionals and business leaders alike is to minimise the impact these vulnerabilities can have.

Despite high-profile cases like Adobe’s data breach, organisations are still neglecting to raise awareness for effective organisation-wide password security. By neglecting password security, these organisations are putting their own data at risk.

Using weak passwords is one of the most common information security mistakes your employees can make; so to help prevent your organisation from falling victim to a serious data breach, we’re taking a look at how to improve organisation-wide password security.

Not all security breaches happen because of malicious intent. Some of the most common security issues are caused by bad habits ingrained in employees’ day-to-day routines.

Thankfully, these potential threats and vulnerabilities are possible to reduce, by improving organisation-wide awareness of the most common information security mistakes.