Application Security (AppSec) Managed Services
Summary
Managed-services application security engineer administering Akamai WAF, Checkmarx (SAST/SCA), Okta identity, Qualys vulnerability scanning, and Radware DDoS/WAF protection — tuning policies, triaging alerts and false positives, tracking remediation, and supporting incident response for internet-facing apps and APIs.
**1. AKAMAI ** Responsible for the administration and operational support of Akamai security services protecting internet-facing applications and APIs.
**Expected activities: **
- Administer and maintain Akamai application security configurations.
- Maintain Web Application Firewall (WAF) security policies and associated rules.
- Configure and maintain protections for internet-facing applications and APIs.
- Review WAF events, alerts, blocked requests, and security incidents.
- Investigate suspicious traffic and application-layer attacks detected by Akamai.
- Analyze false positives and recommend or implement appropriate rule adjustments.
- Tune WAF policies while minimizing impact to legitimate application traffic.
- Support onboarding of new applications and websites into Akamai protection.
- Support modification and retirement of existing protected applications.
- Maintain application hostnames, security configurations, and associated policies.
- Review security policy changes prior to production deployment.
- Coordinate application testing following security configuration changes.
- Support troubleshooting of application connectivity or accessibility issues associated with Akamai security controls.
- Assist application teams in determining whether legitimate transactions are being blocked.
- Support investigation of web attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, malicious bots, and other application-layer threats.
- Maintain IP allowlists/blocklists and other access restrictions where required.
- Support rate-limiting and application protection policies.
- Assist with bot and automated traffic investigations where applicable.
- Review security dashboards and reports for abnormal traffic patterns.
- Support certificate and TLS-related activities associated with protected applications where assigned.
- Maintain documentation of security policies, exceptions, configurations, and operational procedures.
- Periodically review existing policies for obsolete rules and unnecessary exceptions.
- Participate in security incident response involving Akamai-protected applications.
**2. CHECKMARX ** Responsible for operating and supporting Checkmarx as part of the secure software development lifecycle and application vulnerability management process.
**Expected activities: **
- Administer and maintain the Checkmarx platform.
- Manage application/project onboarding into Checkmarx.
- Configure application security scanning requirements.
- Support Static Application Security Testing (SAST).
- Support Software Composition Analysis (SCA)/open-source dependency scanning where licensed and implemented.
- Support other Checkmarx scanning capabilities implemented by the organization.
- Configure scan projects, presets, policies, teams, and access as required.
- Manage scheduled and on-demand application security scans.
- Monitor scan execution and investigate failed, incomplete, or abnormal scans.
- Review application security scan findings.
- Assist development teams in understanding identified vulnerabilities.
- Provide technical guidance regarding application security findings and remediation.
- Help distinguish actionable findings from potential false positives.
- Manage or support false-positive and risk-acceptance workflows.
- Track vulnerabilities through appropriate remediation processes.
- Monitor outstanding vulnerabilities and remediation status.
- Escalate critical or high-risk findings according to established security processes.
- Support integration of Checkmarx with CI/CD pipelines such as Jenkins or Azure DevOps where implemented.
- Assist DevOps teams in troubleshooting automated security scans.
- Support security quality gates and pipeline policies where implemented.
- Review scan coverage and identify applications or repositories not being scanned.
- Support secure coding initiatives by identifying recurring vulnerability patterns.
- Provide application security scan reports to application owners and stakeholders.
- Assist with vulnerability trend analysis.
- Maintain scanning policies and security thresholds aligned with organizational standards.
- Support Checkmarx platform upgrades, configuration changes, and maintenance activities.
- Administer user access and permissions within the platform.
- Maintain documentation for application onboarding, scanning, remediation, exceptions, and operational procedures.
- Coordinate vendor support cases for platform or scanning issues.
- Participate in application security assessments and security reviews.
**3. OKTA ** Responsible for operational support and administration of Okta identity and access security capabilities within the scope assigned to the AppSec function.
Expected activities:
- Administer and maintain Okta configurations within the team's scope.
- Support onboarding and integration of applications with Okta.
- Support SAML and OpenID Connect/OAuth-based application integrations.
- Configure and maintain application authentication policies.
- Support Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) policies.
- Investigate authentication failures and abnormal authentication events.
- Support user/group assignments to applications where assigned.
- Review application integration configurations and security settings.
- Assist with creation and modification of application integrations.
- Support certificate and signing-certificate maintenance for applicable integrations.
- Monitor security events and authentication logs.
- Investigate suspicious login activity and identity-related security events.
- Review administrative and application access within the platform.
- Support periodic access and configuration reviews.
- Assist with access revocation during security incidents where necessary.
- Support lifecycle and provisioning integrations where they fall within the role's responsibility.
- Maintain documentation for application integrations, authentication flows, configurations, and operational procedures.
- Support Okta platform changes, upgrades, and feature implementation.
- Coordinate vendor support cases for Okta-related technical issues.
- Participate in identity-related incident investigation and response.
4. QUALYS Responsible for supporting vulnerability identification, assessment, reporting, and remediation tracking using Qualys.
Expected activities:
- Administer and maintain Qualys capabilities assigned to the AppSec/security team.
- Support onboarding of assets into vulnerability scanning.
- Manage scheduled and on-demand vulnerability scans.
- Monitor scan execution and troubleshoot failed or incomplete scans.
- Review vulnerability findings.
- Validate significant or critical vulnerabilities.
- Investigate suspected false-positive findings.
- Assist system, application, cloud, and infrastructure teams in understanding vulnerabilities.
- Provide remediation guidance based on vulnerability findings.
- Track vulnerabilities through remediation and closure.
- Perform or coordinate rescans following remediation.
- Verify whether identified vulnerabilities have been successfully remediated.
- Monitor aging and overdue vulnerabilities against established remediation targets.
- Escalate critical/high-risk vulnerabilities according to organizational policy.
- Support vulnerability exception and risk-acceptance processes.
- Monitor vulnerability trends and recurring security issues.
- Generate vulnerability reports and dashboards.
- Provide vulnerability metrics to security and technology stakeholders.
- Review scanning coverage to identify assets that are missing or not regularly scanned.
- Support vulnerability assessment of newly deployed systems where required.
- Maintain scanner appliances/agents and associated configurations where applicable.
- Troubleshoot agent communication and scan connectivity issues.
- Coordinate credential management required for authenticated scanning.
- Support Qualys platform upgrades and configuration changes.
- Maintain vulnerability management documentation and operational procedures.
- Coordinate vendor support cases for Qualys platform issues.
- Participate in vulnerability-related security incident investigations.
**5. RADWARE ** Responsible for administration and operational support of Radware security capabilities used to protect business applications and services.
Expected activities:
- Administer and maintain Radware security configurations within the organization's deployed solution.
- Monitor application and network security events generated by Radware.
- Review alerts and identify suspicious or malicious activity.
- Support DDoS detection and mitigation activities.
- Investigate abnormal traffic patterns affecting protected applications.
- Support application protection and WAF capabilities where deployed.
- Configure and maintain security policies and protection profiles.
- Tune security policies to reduce false positives while maintaining appropriate protection.
- Maintain appropriate allowlists, blocklists, thresholds, and exceptions.
- Support onboarding of applications and services into Radware protection.
- Assist application and network teams in troubleshooting traffic that may be affected by Radware controls.
- Investigate blocked or dropped legitimate traffic.
- Support testing following security policy changes.
- Review traffic and attack reports.
- Analyze security events during suspected DDoS or application attacks.
- Support mitigation activities during active security incidents.
- Escalate attacks and platform issues to the appropriate internal teams or Radware support.
- Maintain documentation covering protection policies, configurations, exceptions, and application onboarding.
- Periodically review protection configurations for obsolete rules or unnecessary exceptions.
- Support platform upgrades, maintenance, licensing, and configuration changes where assigned.
- Generate security reports and provide relevant information to stakeholders.
- Participate in DDoS and application security incident response activities.
**Cross-Platform / General AppSec Responsibilities ** In addition to the individual platforms, the AppSec Engineer should be expected to perform the following activities across the security environment:
**Security Operations **
- Monitor security alerts and events from assigned application security platforms.
- Perform initial investigation and triage of security events.
- Determine the affected application, service, asset, or security control.
- Escalate significant security incidents to the appropriate security operations or incident response teams.
- Provide technical information and evidence required during security investigations.
- Support root-cause analysis for application security incidents.
- Participate in security incident response and post-incident reviews.
**Vulnerability Management **
- Identify and assess security vulnerabilities affecting applications and supporting infrastructure.
- Coordinate remediation activities with development, infrastructure, cloud, and application teams.
- Track open security findings through closure.
- Verify remediation through rescanning or appropriate validation.
- Maintain visibility of outstanding critical and high-risk vulnerabilities.
- Escalate overdue or unacceptable security risks based on organizational standards.
- Support security exception and risk-acceptance processes.
Application Security / Secure SDLC
- Work with application development teams throughout the application lifecycle.
- Support integration of application security testing into CI/CD processes.
- Promote early identification of vulnerabilities during development.
- Provide technical assistance for remediation of application vulnerabilities.
- Support secure coding practices based on recognized guidance such as OWASP.
- Participate in application security assessments for new applications and significant changes.
- Support application go-live/security readiness reviews where required.
**Security Platform Administration **
- Maintain health and availability of assigned security platforms.
- Perform routine administrative activities across assigned platforms.
- Maintain security policies, configurations, integrations, and scanning profiles.
- Manage administrative access according to least-privilege principles.
- Review privileged access periodically.
- Support software/platform upgrades and maintenance.
- Monitor platform capacity, licensing, agents/sensors, integrations, and operational health where applicable.
- Troubleshoot platform issues and coordinate vendor support cases.
- Test security changes before production implementation where practical.
- Maintain backup/export or configuration recovery procedures where supported by organizational processes.
**Change and Configuration Management **
- Implement authorized security configuration changes.
- Assess the potential security and operational impact of changes.
- Document security configuration changes.
- Coordinate application testing after changes.
- Maintain appropriate segregation between development/test and production configuration where applicable.
- Maintain records of rules, exclusions, exceptions, and temporary configuration changes.
- Periodically review temporary exceptions and remove them when no longer required.
**Reporting and Governance **
- Produce regular security status and operational reports.
- Maintain dashboards for vulnerabilities, security alerts, scanning coverage, and remediation status.
- Provide metrics for management and...