Even if a developer team adheres to secure coding standards and keeps dependencies up to date, they can still ship software with a vulnerability. The reason is simple: real attacks don’t always follow a checklist. An attacker can combine a weak authorization with an unprotected API, misuse a workflow for password reset, or discover that data from one tenant is access by a different.

Companies located in Brisbane use professional penetration testing to ensure security. They examine systems with an adversarial eye. Experienced testers don’t ask if security controls are in place, but rather whether they are able to be bypassed.

This is crucial to Australian organisations who handle sensitive data such as customer data, financial records, healthcare records or other assets.

The automated scanning process is only part of the story.

Vulnerability scanners can prove useful. They are able to quickly detect outdated code or headers that are insecure (CVEs) and known CVEs and obvious configuration errors. What they are not able to understand is what an application’s intended to behave.

Imagine a customer portal that lets customers change their account numbers within an application, and also retrieve invoices from another company. The server can deliver perfectly valid results and an automated scanner sees nothing unusual. A human test-taker can identify the problem immediately.

Automated web penetration testing with manual analysis is the best way to conduct an excellent test. Testing tests authentication, sessions and access control as well as injection risks, API behaviors, configuration weaknesses and business processes.

SaaS environments come with their own security concerns

Cloud applications that are multi-tenant require special care when testing, as a single error can result in a massive impact on many users at once.

Saas penetration tests must include tenant isolation, API authorizations, role changes, and account recovery. Additionally, they should analyze integrations with other external services including data exposure, account recovery as well as API authorization. The tester should not just verify that the feature functions but also if it can be utilized in a way which was never planned by the developer.

For instance, a user who is assigned a simple role may not find an administrative task within the interface. It doesn’t mean the API will stop them from making calls directly. Making that distinction requires constant testing, not just a review of what appears on screen.

Modern web applications have more extensive attack surface

Today’s applications combine JavaScript front end, APIs and cloud services. They also contain microservices and integrations from third parties. Any component, or the trust relationship between them, may have weaknesses.

Thorough web app penetration testing follows those connections. The testers can look at how authorization and tokens are handled, whether secure servers enforce the same rules and how data is transferred between services by users, and even if a vulnerability that appears to be low-risk could be paired with another vulnerability to cause a major breach.

Siege Cyber specializes in this type of testing of applications and uses modern frameworks such as APIs, cloud-hosted platforms as well as complex architectures for applications instead of treating every website as a collection of URLs that need to be scanned.

The report will guide developers in resolving the issue

The task of identifying vulnerabilities is only half the task. Security testing offers the most value when engineers can reproduce an issue, identify the risk, and remediate it effectively.

Siege Cyber’s annual reports provide information on evidence of reproducible steps and risk assessments, as well as impacts analysis, and practical remediation. Technical teams receive the details needed to resolve the issue, while business stakeholders get an executive level description of the risk. Rather than waiting until the final report, critical findings can be escalated to business stakeholders at the time of the engagement.

The process of retesting the system after remediation provides an additional layer of confidence to ensure that the original problem has been removed without the need for a new system.

Organizations seeking independent verification, proof of compliance or higher confidence before a release can gain by conducting penetration tests. It gives a secure environment to see how an attacker who is skilled could attack the system. The benefit of this exercise is finding that answer before an actual adversary.