49% of security pros think Java apps are vulnerable to attacks

In a recent poll, half of the senior IT professionals polled said their Java applications are vulnerable (32%) or very vulnerable (17%) to attacks. They cited insecure coding (60%) and vulnerabilities in third party libraries (25%) as the leading threats.

Meanwhile, nearly 90 percent of respondents said their security teams didn’t possess enough information about data center applications to enable them to properly protect those apps from attack.

“Custom developed Java-based applications dominate virtually every industry, especially financial services and ecommerce,” said Brian Maccaba, CEO of Waratek. “Since many of these enterprise applications are running on older versions of the platform and use third party code, it’s not surprising that so many security professionals are concerned about vulnerabilities in these programs.”

Waratek surveyed more than 130 CISO, CSO, CIO and other IT executives at the recent Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit about their enterprise and application security concerns.

According to those polled:

• Keeping up with the latest threats (43%) and finding/retaining talent (25%) are their biggest enterprise security challenges
• Their biggest concerns are loss of company reputation due to data breaches (55%) and loss of customer data and intellectual property (34%)
• Java applications are vulnerable (32%), very vulnerable (17%) and only somewhat secure (34%)
• The leading threats to Java applications are insecure coding (60%), vulnerabilities in third party libraries (25%) and SQL Injection attacks (19%)
• Security teams lack sufficient information about applications in order to protect them (87%).