3 Reasons Your Middleware is Compromised

ONE: A Failure to implement app level encryption

When developers create a middleware messaging connection between apps, they may choose to do so without encryption, to keep things fast and simple.

Often apps rely on middleware level encryption which secures data in transit between middleware hubs (brokers).

But without app level encryption, it can be very easy for hackers to snoop on the applications messages, and even inject fraudulent messages into the flow to disrupt or corrupt your business.

It’s critical to ensure that all messages between apps are encrypted end-to-end.

TWO: Lack of audit for all actions and changes

Tools provided with various middleware platforms often allow powerful administrative functions to be delivered without any records being kept.

This can create security, performance and reliability issues, because without a record of what was done, it can be very complex to discover and remediate.

For example: an administrator could modify the persistence level of one of the topics or queues to memory.

This would mean that in the event of a recovery or restart, some message would be lost, and without a record of the change, this could become a critical event.

THREE: Lack of understanding of message flow patterns

Most monitoring solutions are configured to measure discrete processes such as availability, latency, errors and backlogs, but they fail to monitor the order in which activities are supposed to take place.

If a business process should start at step A and proceed through steps B and C, then if step B is triggered without coming from step A, this could indicate a security breach.

If you can measure and visualize the flow of messages through a business process, you can spot unusual uses of a subprocess and create an intelligent security alert.