A team of developers can adhere to secure coding standards, keep the dependencies up-to-date, but still ship a vulnerability that nobody realizes. This is because real attacks rarely follow a set of guidelines. An attacker can combine a weak authentication rule with a vulnerable API endpoint, abuse the process of resetting passwords or discover that a client account has access to a tenant’s details.
Professional penetration testing Brisbane businesses use for security assurance looks at systems from that adversarial perspective. Instead of asking if security controls exist, experienced testers investigate whether the controls are actually able to be manipulated.
This distinction is critical for Australian companies who deal with sensitive information like customer information, financial records, healthcare records or other assets.
The automated scanning process only tells a small portion of the story
Vulnerability scanners are very useful. They can identify obsolete code as well as insecure headers (CVEs) that are known to be CVEs and obvious configuration issues. But, they aren’t able to grasp the behavior of an application.
Imagine a customer portal, where users can modify the account number in a request and retrieve another company’s invoices. A computerized scanner won’t detect anything unusual if a server is returning fully valid responses. A human test-taker can identify the issue immediately.
Automated penetration testing for web applications with manual analysis is the secret to the highest quality test. Testers search for weaknesses in session and authentication API behaviour and configuration, and access control, injection risk, API behavior.
SaaS-based services pose questions on security
Multi-tenant cloud applications require extra care when testing, as any one error could be devastating to multiple users at the same time.
Effective Saas penetration testing must focus on tenant isolation, privileged functions, API authorization, role changes, account recovery data exposure as well as integrations with external services. The tester needs to not just understand if a feature is working and if it is able to be altered in a manner that the development team did not intend.
A user who has a basic role, for example, may not be able to see administrative functions in the interface. This does not mean that the API is preventing them from calling directly. Discovering that distinction requires active testing, not just a review of the screen.
Modern web applications are more secure and have a greater attack surface
Today’s applications combine JavaScript front end APIs, cloud services, and APIs. They also contain microservices and integrations from third party vendors. Any component, or the relationship of trust between them, may have an issue.
Thorough web app penetration testing is conducted to determine the connection. Testing could involve examining the process of generating tokens, whether the endpoints that are sensitive enforce authentication in a consistent manner, and the way that data stored by users is moved between different services.
Siege Cyber is an expert in this type of testing application. They use modern frameworks, such as APIs and cloud-hosted platforms. They also test advanced application architectures.
This report is an excellent tool for developers to identify the answer.
Finding vulnerabilities is only half the task. The most effective security testing is when engineers are able to reproduce and comprehend the issue, as well as remediate the threat.
Siege Cyber reports include evidence of reproduction, steps to reproduce Risk ratings, impact analysis, as well as practical recommendations for remediation. The executive report on the risk is communicated to business leaders, while the technical team gets the specifics needed to solve the problem. Rather than waiting until the report’s final version, critical findings can be communicated to the business partners during the meeting.
The process of retesting the system following remediation gives another layer of assurance to ensure that the initial issue has been resolved without creating a brand new system.
For those who want independent validation, compliance evidence or more confidence prior to a major release, penetration testing provides something policies and automated tools cannot: a controlled opportunity to discover how a skilled attacker could be able to attack the system. Finding that answer before a real adversary has a chance to do so is what makes the exercise useful.
