To support startups that are particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks, yet often sideline cybersecurity, the French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (ANSSI) and La French Tech have released a practical guide, spanning from ideation to scaling.
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As cyberattacks increasingly target small and emerging businesses, particularly through ransomware attacks, cybersecurity tends to take a backseat in startups. These businesses face multiple challenges including small teams, limited resources, and developing expertise in cybersecurity.
To address these issues, ANSSI and the French Tech Mission have newly published a practical guide aimed at digital startups. The goal is to establish information security as a strategic pillar and a competitive lever, while maintaining their flexibility throughout their lifecycle.
Defining a digital startup, according to ANSSI and French Tech
Specifically, a digital startup offers goods or services related to information and communication technologies (ICT), regardless of the industry,” the guide clarifies.
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13 Security Challenges in a Digital Startup’s Lifecycle
The guide co-edited by ANSSI and the French Tech Mission begins with a timeline summarizing the lifecycle of a digital startup at various stages of maturity, from ideation to scaling (see the image). It highlights 13 challenges that correspond to key stages in a company’s life. Each stage is accompanied by a practical sheet that provides a succinct overview of the risks and tailored, concrete recommendations.
Here are the 13 steps identified in this cybersecurity guide for startups:
- How to protect the company’s know-how?
- How to secure workstations?
- What are the regulatory obligations?
- How to secure the use of third-party components?
- How to secure the development environment?
- What tools to use to secure development?
- How to value security?
- How to secure deployments?
- How to secure the product industrialization process?
- What cybersecurity considerations are there when scaling up my business?
- How to choose a hosting solution for data and processing?
- How to manage collaborative work securely?
- How to secure a fundraising event?
The document serves as a roadmap for founders, CTOs, and teams aiming to build robust companies without compromising their agility: clear principles, concrete reflexes, and actionable tools to secure infrastructures, protect data, and foster a culture of vigilance. It is also intended for incubators and accelerators looking to incorporate cybersecurity into their service offerings.
Development and Deployment: Two Critical Phases in Cybersecurity
Among the various issues highlighted in the guide, securing the development environment and deployment processes are crucial stages in launching a product. These are not the only ones, but they exemplify the guide’s philosophy: to anticipate risks at each key moment rather than suffering them. Often, these technical phases, seen as the core business of developers, are where security best practices are most likely to be overlooked, due to lack of time or awareness. Overview of the best practices shared by ANSSI and the French Tech Mission on these points.
Securing the Development Environment: Protecting the Product’s Core
The development environment holds the startup’s most valuable assets: the product’s source code, identification data, technical configurations. It reflects the company’s expertise and is the starting point for everything delivered to the customer. If this environment is compromised, the integrity of the final product and its users are at risk.
Attacks targeting the software supply chain are on the rise, and insecure development environments often serve as the entry point. For a growing startup, where each developer might have broad access to the entire system, the risks of intellectual property leakage or exposing customers to cyberattacks are particularly high.
Best Practices for Securing Your Development Environment
To mitigate these risks, the guide recommends:
- Applying the principle of least privilege: only granting developers access necessary for their tasks,
- Never storing production-sensitive data in the development environment,
- Signing commits to verify the code source’s integrity and origin,
- Implementing peer code reviews with a focus on cybersecurity,
- Never storing passwords or keys in plaintext, and generalizing the use of secret managers,
- Keeping all components of the development environment up to date,
- Training developers in security best practices and secure coding.
Securing Deployments: A Critical Stage for Production
Deployment marks the stage where the source code becomes a product delivered to the client. This phase is particularly sensitive as it directly impacts production: an incident can affect the startup’s operation, reputation, or even its economic stability. The risk is heightened as deployments often involve multiple suppliers with varying levels of maturity, and the increasing automation through the cloud creates new vulnerabilities. Malicious code deployed in production, insecure configurations, or unapplied security patches can have immediate and difficult consequences to manage.
Best Practices for Securing Your Deployments
For this critical stage, the guide advises implementing the following actions:
- Automating integration and deployment processes,
- Signing constructed software elements (artifacts) to verify their integrity before production,
- Limited administration account privileges and reviewing these rights every six months,
- Separating the integration environment from the deployment environment,
- Establishing mechanisms for rollback in case of an incident,
- Logging activities to facilitate investigation in case of issues.
The guide is available for free download on the ANSSI website.
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Jordan Park writes in-depth reviews and editorial opinion pieces for Touch Reviews. With a background in UI/UX design, Jordan offers a unique perspective on device usability and user experience across smartphones, tablets, and mobile software.