Staying up to date on the latest threats is crucial for protecting cloud-based applications from vulnerabilities and attacks. Organizations must leverage threat modeling to surface vulnerabilities in an application's design, implement validation and access controls at the application level, and create an effective monitoring strategy that includes detecting malicious activity at the network, endpoint, and code layers. This enables organizations to build a defense-in-depth strategy that complements their existing security measures, including endpoint and network perimeter security. By following best practices such as input validation, authentication and authorization, and software composition analysis, organizations can protect their cloud-based applications from various types of attacks and threats.