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Application security vulnerabilities have become a top attack vector that can result in exploits that do serious damage. According to the 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, exploitation of vulnerabilities has overtaken phishing as the second most common cause of cyber security breaches.
Applications are attractive targets because of their complexity. In addition, security solutions such as firewalls and endpoint detection and response (EDR) aren't designed to pinpoint vulnerable lines of code and automatically block application exploits.Threat actors know these vulnerabilities are common, and they constantly probe to identify application vulnerabilities; research shows the average application in production receives around 500 million calls to potentially dangerous functions in a month. Application security risks and successful application attacks can impact businesses in multiple ways—from disrupting operations, critical data theft and ransom, and brand degradation.
Contrast Application Detection and Response (ADR) provides the missing visibility and protection layer for web applications by operating directly inside the application runtime. Using lightweight threat sensors embedded within the application, ADR gains deep, continuous context into code execution, data flow, library usage, and configuration. This unique vantage point allows Contrast ADR to perform precise behavioral detection and intervention, identifying and blocking sophisticated application-layer attacks that bypass traditional perimeter and endpoint defenses.
An application attack consists of threat actors gaining access to unauthorized areas. Attackers most commonly start with a look at the application layer, hunting for application vulnerabilities written within code. Though attacks target certain programming languages more than others, many applications representing various languages receive attacks: .NET, Java, Node.js, Python and many more. Vulnerabilities are found in both custom code and open-source frameworks and libraries.
Application vulnerabilities create opportunities for threat actors to exploit applications in production. These exploits target both custom code and open-source frameworks and libraries. Some of the methods employed include:
No application is entirely free of potential vulnerability. There are a number of reasons this application security risk is so significant, starting with the fact that developers are under increasing pressure to shorten release cycles. Legacy application security tools are inaccurate and generate piles of false positives that waste valuable time on the part of security teams, in triage and diagnosis. When vulnerabilities are not identified and remediated, bad actors use probes and targeted attacks to pinpoint and exploit them, often with deleterious consequences.
Attackers know that the increased pressure on developers and software engineers to release applications means increased chances for mistakes in code. It is an ongoing battle between cybersecurity professionals and threat actors. Each side constantly tries to catch up to the other, with attackers always trying to get a step up from today’s legacy application security measures. Application attacks are evolving at a faster pace than application security measures.
Some of the most common internet/web application attacks include:
A cross-site scripting (XSS) attack is on the OWASP Top 10 as one of today's most common application attacks. Attackers execute this attack by searching for a vulnerability that allows them to access core code, often creating a corrupted link and sending it via email or text. If this application vulnerability is exploited, threat actors can inject malicious code on the client side, taking control over HTTP requests. With control over HTTP executions, threat actors have little to no limits in accessing personally identifiable information (PII)—including banking details, Social Security numbers and even highly sensitive government information.
SQL injection attacks remain one of the most prevalent application attack types. SQL statements are used within applications and network communications, permitting access through authorizations and authentications. When a bad actor obtains SQL statements and tampers with them, they can manipulate applications into executing corrupted commands that allow them to gain access to otherwise unauthorized areas. With access to core code and manipulation of communications between other web applications, threat actors have the entire software environment at their disposal, able to evade security checks and protocols and be left to roam around undetected until it is too late.
Applications are often constructed with borders that users cannot cross. On one side rests an application's infrastructure and inner workings, allowing only administrative teams access to make changes to structures. On the other side is the application's front end, which is accessible to authenticated users. When the borders are broken and users can access administrative areas, it is known as a broken access control attack. Broken access control attacks rank No. 3 in the latest OWASP Top 10, taking place often and leaving user credentials and the entire application infrastructure at risk.
A path traversal (or directory traversal) attack is an application attack that targets an application's root directory. Normally, due to a manipulated dot-slash sequence, path traversal attacks trick applications into allowing access to server files where all of the information within a system rests. Accessed data can include user credentials, access tokens, and even entire system backups that hold everything from sensitive data to system access controls.
A session hijacking attack tampers with session IDs. This unique ID is used to label a user’s time online, keeping track of all activity for faster and more efficient future logins. Depending on the strength of the session ID, attackers could capture and manipulate the session ID, launching a session hijacking attack. If successful, attackers will have access to all information passed through the server for that particular session, getting hold of user credentials to access personal accounts.
In the 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report released by IBM, the average cost of a data breach was pegged at $4.88 million. When an application is attacked, every single user who is signed up and has an account is at risk of sensitive data exposure. Capturing sensitive details leads to loss of confidence in a brand, tainting them long after the problem is patched and they are back in business. Beyond having a detrimental brand impact, application attacks can disrupt operations. Application downtime translates into lost productivity and even lost revenue. It can also impact the loyalty of existing customers.
Because of the impact that both companies and users can experience due to an application attack, securing applications in development and deployment, and protecting web applications once in production, is crucial.
Historically, application security steps occurred at the end of the development process before deployment. One approach used in application development to identify vulnerabilities is through legacy vulnerability scanning tools. There are two types of legacy approaches here. Static application security testing (SAST) analyzes an application’s source code early in the software development life cycle (SDLC) for vulnerabilities. Dynamic application security testing (DAST) is designed to find vulnerabilities during an application’s running state.
Dedicated application security specialists would also sometimes identify application vulnerabilities using penetration testing. However, there are numerous problems with penetration testing. The problem with pentesting is that it's a point-in-time analysis similar to pre-production scans. It's also expensive and can't keep up with the constant releases of software updates.
Legacy application security scanning is problematic on multiple fronts. First, legacy static scanning identifies every possible vulnerability and packages them into a report, often as a PDF. But many of the purported vulnerabilities in those reports are false positives. Development and security teams expend significant time and resources triaging and diagnosing alerts that pose no threat.
Second, like penetration testing, legacy static scanning requires specialized application security experts who are hard to find and retain. Legacy dynamic scanning has its downsides as well. First, DAST relies heavily on application security experts to write tests. Second, it is difficult to scale as organizations add more applications in development. Third, false negatives (missed vulnerabilities) are inherently going to occur due to the nature of legacy dynamic scanning.
Rather than approaching application security from the outside in, growing numbers of organizations are doing so from the inside out. Via instrumentation, organizations can shift applications left in development and detect vulnerabilities during runtime. This virtually eliminates false positives by pinpointing only vulnerabilities that can be exploited. And because instrumentation is within software, it is easier to integrate application security within IDE processes and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
A growing number of organizations are also now testing for vulnerabilities in production. Application Vulnerability Monitoring (AVM) helps developers know what to prioritize so they don't get bogged down with endless backlogs.
For a couple of decades, perimeter defenses have been used to protect against web application attacks. Web application firewalls (WAFs) protect the application perimeter from the outside in. However, the list of alerts is often full of false positives that require valuable time and energy to triage and diagnose. The same issues with false positives in development apply here, though the security operations (SecOps) team is typically the one most impacted in production environments.
Traditional security tools like WAFs operate at the network perimeter and rely on signatures, leaving them blind to attacks that understand application context or use novel techniques. WAFs are notorious for generating excessive noise – sending floods of alerts based on traffic patterns that have less than 0.25% correlation to real exploits (compared to 100% from ADR), forcing SecOps teams to sift through mountains of false positives and risk missing genuine threats.
Think of it like this: For every 1000 times a WAF cries wolf about suspicious traffic, less than three of those alerts point to an actual attack attempt that could cause harm. In contrast, when Contrast ADR flags an event, you know it's a real exploit attempt – a 100% correlation to real threats. And the worst part, those alerts don’t have much context for quick triage so just imagine how much time is wasted if SecOps would actually look into all alerts.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tools provide visibility into the operating system and kernel activity, which is valuable, but fundamentally lack insight into the application's internal logic, data flow, and code execution.
Our research shows that EDRs miss high-impact application attacks like SQL injection and untrusted deserialization entirely due to this lack of application-layer visibility. Even for application attacks within an EDR's potential visibility (like some command injection variants), EDRs often lack the context to identify the behavior as an application attack correctly or only see it much further along in the kill chain, long after initial compromise or damage.
This leaves a critical application blindspot where sophisticated attacks operate unseen by perimeter and endpoint defenses, demanding a security solution that works from inside the application to provide comprehensive coverage.
Unlike WAFs, Application Detection and Response (ADR) provides protection from inside the application runtime, using behavior anomaly detection to provide a robust defense against classes of application attacks. Using instrumentation to embed ADR within an application's source code, security teams have a continuous monitor inside the application. Its accuracy is far more advanced than legacy application tools, taking some of the pressure off of stressed-out SecOps teams. Because ADR provides a runtime view, it provides swift detection of vulnerabilities and diagnoses and triages long before an application attack can exploit them.
Contrast ADR is the essential security layer providing comprehensive detection and protection against the full spectrum of application attacks that evade traditional perimeter and endpoint tools, empowering SecOps teams with unmatched visibility and control.
Significant benefits of using Contrast ADR for protecting applications in production:
Effective protection: Stop injection and command injection attacks in real-time with precise, in-application blocking that neutralizes exploits without impacting legitimate users. Deploy compensating controls to block exploitation attempts against vulnerability classes like path traversal and deserialization. Protect against entire classes of vulnerabilities, like injection and XSS, by understanding underlying attack techniques.
