Security by Design

Security by design means building security into systems from the earliest design stages rather than adding it as an afterthought. It includes threat modeling during design, secure coding practices during development, and regular security testing. GDPR mandates "privacy by design" as a legal requirement for EU-facing products. The OWASP SAMM and BSIMM frameworks provide maturity models for measuring and improving security-by-design practices across organizations.

Why it matters for your website

• 1Foundational principle in modern security — harder to retrofit than to build in from the start
• 2Reduces breach impact by limiting what attackers can access if they get in
• 3Required control in ISO 27001, NIST CSF, and most compliance frameworks