A development team can follow strict coding guidelines, keep the dependencies up-to-date, but still release a vulnerability to the public that nobody is aware of. This is because most attacks don’t follow a checklist. An attacker can use a weak authorization in conjunction with an unprotected API and then use a faulty process for reset of passwords, or find out that information from one tenant could be used by a different.
Businesses operating in Brisbane utilize penetration tests conducted by professionals to guarantee security. They examine systems through the adversarial lens. Instead of determining whether security controls exist, experienced testers look at whether these controls are actually possible to bypass.
The distinction is important for Australian businesses that deal with sensitive assets such as financial information, healthcare records and customer information, among other sensitive assets.
The automated scanning is just one aspect of the whole story.
Vulnerability scanners are useful. They can quickly spot outdated code or headers that are insecure (CVEs), known CVEs, and even obvious configuration errors. But, they aren’t able to understand how an application behaves.
Imagine a customer portal, where users can modify the account number in a request and access another invoices from a company. A computerized scanner won’t find anything suspicious if the server is sending exactly valid results. Human testers can detect the issue with authorization right away.
A high-quality penetration test for web security combines automated testing with manual examination. The testers look for issues in session and authentication API behavior and configuration in addition to access controls such as injection risk, API behavior.
SaaS-based services raise their own questions about security
Multi-tenant cloud solutions require careful testing because one mistake can affect several customers at the same time.
Saas penetration tests should incorporate tenant isolation, API authorizations, role changes and account recovery. They also need to analyze integrations with other external services as well as accounts recovery, exposure to data as well as API authorization. Testers must understand not just if a feature works, but whether it is possible to manipulate it in a way the team behind the development never anticipated.
If a user is given an account that does not contain administrative functions, they may not be able to see them in the interface. This doesn’t mean that the core API prevents them from calling it directly. Finding out the difference requires active testing, not just a review of what is displayed on the screen.
Web applications that are modern and mobile are more prone to attacks
Modern applications typically combine JavaScript front ends APIs, cloud services, APIs and microservices, identity providers as well as third-party integrations. Any component, or the relationship of trust between them, may have an issue.
Thorough web app penetration testing follows those connections. Testing could include looking at how tokens are generated and whether endpoints with sensitive security enforce authentication on a regular basis, or how data stored by users is moved across services.
Siege Cyber specializes in this type of application testing and is able to work with modern frameworks and APIs, cloud-hosted systems, and complex application architectures instead of treating every site as a collection of URLs for scanning.
The report will help developers to fix the problem
The task of identifying vulnerabilities is only half the job. The most useful security testing occurs when engineers can reproduce and understand the problem, as well as remediate the risk.
Siege Cyber reports contain evidence that includes reproduction steps and risk rating. They also provide impacts analyses and practical advice on remediation and a comprehensive analysis of the impact. Technical teams receive the details needed to resolve the issue and business stakeholder get an executive-level description of the risk. Instead of waiting until the final report, critical results can be communicated to the business stakeholder during the meeting.
The test after remediation adds a second layer of confidence by proving that the initial flaw has been addressed without creating another one.
For those who want independent validation, compliance evidence or more confidence prior to the release of a major version, penetration testing provides something tools and policies cannot provide: a controlled opportunity to determine how a skilled attacker might actually get into the system. The importance of the test is determining the answer prior to the actual attacker.