Databases are some of the most valuable sources of data for organizations of any type, from healthcare to online retailers. In turn, they’re also some of the highest-value targets for attackers and a trove full of personnel information, financial data, and inventory asset data—and that’s just a few examples of what they can hold.
Most of your organization’s most valuable information is likely stored in your database. Therefore, it’s essential to follow these database security standards and best practices to keep that valuable information safe.
For companies maintaining databases of any type, there are regulations that the industry follows from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), as well as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). At a glance, the most basic of these standards include:
These regulations are generalized and far-reaching. There are other standards and regulations these organizations provide as well, all to protect consumer privacy within sensitive applications and databases of any type.
Informed professionals involved in database security understand that while basic security principles apply, they often have to take a database-specific approach. Numerous circumstantial factors play into the security measures you should take for your database. However, some basic security principles will always hold true for database security.
As a best practice for database security, PLP refers to providing the minimum amount of access and permissions that users need to perform tasks or access the database’s contents. It typically means ensuring that only authorized users with the right roles have elevated privileges in your database.
As part of the process, your team needs to review user privileges and permissions regularly. Doing so can help you prevent privilege creep, or the gradual accumulation of unnecessary rights and privileges.
However, database administrators should generally only grant rights and privileges that a user needs to perform their tasks—and nothing more. This can secure the database and make it less vulnerable to attackers who gain access to a user account.
Platform and application hardening requires an intimate understanding of your platform’s vulnerabilities and attack surface areas. By having this information, you can take a proactive, preemptive approach to addressing known and potential weaknesses.
In many cases, hardening your application or platform entails uninstalling or disabling features or services that you don’t use. It also means enforcing password hygiene, especially for shared accounts, or deleting accounts that aren’t in use.
You should also ensure that every security control your database offers is enabled and set to maximum tolerable levels. To go the extra mile in protecting your data, you can use code security testing tools like Kiuwan and application hardening tools like PreEmptive to harden your application. They make your database more challenging to break into and exploit, and can potentially stop hackers mid-attempt by shutting down the application if it detects suspicious activity.
Whether the data in your database is at rest or in transit, you should always ensure that it’s encrypted—as well as its snapshots and backups.
Every piece of data or metadata that is coming into or going out of your database should be encrypted from end to end. Your data should also include security tags or classifications so you can apply full-blown security policies and protections.
Furthermore, your team should be monitoring the access and use of your data, along with its export and exfiltration. Every single instance should be readily explained or understood—if there’s an unexplained instance, you should be prepared to take protective actions.
If you don’t monitor it, you can’t measure it. That applies just as much to databases as it does to other applications and platforms. For databases in particular, this includes:
Using the right database security scanning tools also makes it easier to monitor and audit your database. For example, Kiuwan’s software governance tools allow your team to more easily audit and analyze changes to your database, as well as track SLAs and implement action plans that help your team respond to potential issues more efficiently.
By protecting the links that provide access to your database, you can prevent bad actors from potentially gaining access to all the sensitive data it holds. In that vein, firewalls are indispensable tools for protecting databases and the applications surrounding them—especially web applications.
Database firewalls should block outbound connections unless your team has a designated, short-term reason to allow them. Similarly, inbound traffic should only be allowed from well-known applications or web servers with legitimate reasons to access the database.
Web application firewalls are also essential for protecting your database from unwanted access. This is because insidious attacks like SQL injection attacks can potentially alter, delete, or export the contents of your database. While a database firewall has some chance to let these attempted attacks succeed, a web application firewall can prevent them—this makes them essential if your database can be accessed through the web or if other web applications are involved.
For as convenient as it can be to have your databases connected and communicating with each other, there are a lot of risks with keeping your databases on the same server. For companies that store their databases on-premises, this also means keeping your database’s servers in a separate area while using separate hardware.
While this may be less feasible for databases stored in the cloud, there are still steps that cloud-based teams can take to protect their assets. Namely, your team should assure itself that your cloud storage providers are properly isolating your database. This can prevent other applications or servers from accessing the contents of your database and protect it from unauthorized transactions.
Your attack surface area refers to any potential entry point on your database, client, or other related applications that can be used to launch a cyberattack. Fortunately, attack surface areas can be reduced, especially when you follow the right steps and use the best tools available. Some steps you can take to reduce your attack surface area include:
As a database security testing tool, Kiuwan’s programs allow database administrators and developers to test their database’s code for possible security vulnerabilities. They scan both proprietary and open-source code for potential security threats and make it easy to address them quickly.
Kiuwan SAST and SCA also allow users to prioritize making security adjustments to a database’s code. This makes it easier for them to protect sensitive data and automatically keep unauthorized users from gaining access.
Kiuwan makes it easier to test application vulnerabilities and keep your database secure at all times. To see for yourself how Kiuwan SCA and SAST can help you protect your database, your users, and everyone in your database, request a demo today.
