“Doing business in a digital business world requires a proactive approach to cybersecurity, SEVN-X provides terrific support necessary to test platforms for possible vulnerabilities and to provide fractional CISO talent to ensure business platforms are safe and secure.”
Threat Modeling
Threat modeling helps identify potential risks by analyzing the application’s architecture, workflows, and user interactions. By focusing on the most likely attack scenarios, such as privilege escalation or data leakage, it provides a proactive approach to understanding where threats might emerge.
This process also aligns security measures with the application’s functionality and business priorities, ensuring the assessment targets real-world risks.
Secure Architecture Review
A secure architecture review examines the foundational design of the application to identify systemic vulnerabilities that may not be immediately apparent in the code. This includes evaluating data flow diagrams, infrastructure components, and security controls such as firewalls or authentication systems.
By addressing these weaknesses early, organizations can reinforce the overall security of their application and prevent costly redesigns later.
Code Review
Static application security testing (SAST) and manual code reviews uncover insecure coding practices, logic flaws, and potential backdoors. This stage ensures developers adhere to secure coding standards and that codebases remain free of vulnerabilities. Addressing these issues before deployment significantly reduces the likelihood of exploitation and strengthens the overall security posture.
Vulnerability Scanning
Automated vulnerability scanning tools help identify known weaknesses in the application, including outdated components and insecure configurations. This process highlights easily exploitable issues like injection flaws, weak cryptography, and insecure communication channels. While automated scans provide valuable insights, they are most effective when paired with manual validation to eliminate false positives.
Offensive Testing
Penetration testing simulates real-world attack scenarios to identify exploitable vulnerabilities across the application’s layers. This dynamic testing goes beyond automated scans, testing for complex issues like business logic flaws, chained vulnerabilities, or privilege escalation. By replicating potential attacker behaviors, penetration tests provide actionable insights to strengthen the application’s defenses.
Authentication and Authorization
Ensuring robust authentication mechanisms is critical to protecting user accounts and sensitive data. This review examines practices like password policies, multi-factor authentication (MFA), session management, and access controls. Weaknesses in these areas are identified and addressed to prevent unauthorized access and protect against attacks such as credential stuffing or session hijacking.
Data Protection and Privacy
This step evaluates how the application handles sensitive data, ensuring it is encrypted during transmission and at rest. It also checks for compliance with data privacy regulations, such as GDPR or HIPAA, to mitigate legal and reputational risks. Proper data handling practices, such as tokenization and access controls, protect both user and organizational information from breaches.
Third-Party Components Review
Open-source libraries and third-party APIs often introduce hidden vulnerabilities into an application. This analysis evaluates the security and licensing compliance of these components to ensure they meet enterprise standards. Keeping these components updated and secure is essential to reducing the attack surface and mitigating supply chain risks.
Configuration Review
Reviewing server and application configurations helps identify insecure settings that can lead to unauthorized access or data exposure. Misconfigurations, such as overly permissive file permissions or default credentials, are common attack vectors. Ensuring configurations are aligned with security best practices minimizes exposure and strengthens the application’s resilience against threats.
