#SecureDevAware Campaign Hopes to Boost R&D Security Awareness

In honor of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Checkmarx has launched a campaign to raise awareness for secure development within R&D teams. The #SecureDevAware initiative provides CISOs/CSOs and software development managers with a kit that includes physical and online tools to promote secure application development within their organization, like the Game of Hacks challenge. Game of Hacks is an educational solution that helps developers and security experts hone their security skills and educate their peers. The game, which is available for desktop, tablet and mobile, presents the developer with vulnerable pieces of code and challenges them to identify the application layer vulnerability as quickly as possible. “We’ve been seeing a rise in hackers successfully exploiting vulnerabilities in web and mobile applications that often exist from the early development stage of the software and remain undetected until it’s too late,” said Asaph Schulman, vice president of marketing at Checkmarx. “We repeatedly hear security managers and CISOs concerned about the secure coding knowledge of their development teams and are looking to provide more training. With the #SecureDevAware campaign, we are providing, free of charge, a kit with a structured program to allow companies to sharpen their developers’ security acumen in a fun and interactive way so many of the most common security vulnerabilities can be avoided in the first place.” The company said that it has delivered hundreds of Secure Development Kits to R&D teams. The physical kit includes teaser cards, a poster of security tips, stickers, bag pins, Game of Hacks t-shirts as well as instructions for organizing a Game of Hacks Challenge in the workplace. “As we design and use more and more applications that deal with more sensitive data and information than ever before, we need to be fully aware of their security implications. It’s easy to just hope for the best when you release an app and pray nobody finds a vulnerability in it,” said Schulman. “When it comes to development, Secure Development Awareness can pay off big time in the long run.” Read the full article here.