If your organisation is considering penetration testing a critical application, our expert offensive security team recommends getting cybersecurity consulting before the test takes place.
Doing so can result in a much more in-depth test than would otherwise be possible.
Getting a thorough analysis of an application before a test means that testers can focus their testing efforts on mapping the full business risk and vulnerabilities present and recommend the most actionable next steps.
In short, a few days of cybersecurity consulting time can drive serious value.
Here’s how.
Tailor Testing for Critical Applications
Cybersecurity consulting means assessing a critical application's overall architecture and design before a test is conducted.
This involves a hands-on period of security analysis across various levels, including, but not limited to, the following:
- Function of the Application: What the application does and its role in the business operation.
- Infrastructure & Hosting Environment: Where the application is hosted—whether it's cloud-based or on-premises, exposed to the internet or not—and the threats it could face.
- User Levels and Access: The different user levels and their access privileges within the application.
- Secure Development Lifecycle (SDLC): Whether the development team has adhered to best practices for secure application development.
- Security Controls: The controls in place to protect the application and any gaps.
This information helps identify how an application fits within an environment, how real users are likely to interact with it, and what security measures were taken during its development.
During this consulting phase, testers will also perform threat modelling to understand the likely attack vectors that an application might face.
Practically speaking, adding a consultancy phase to testing, which might take two to three days of a consultant’s time, means that the penetration tester gets a security-focused blueprint of the application being tested.
This blueprint helps testers understand critical components and potential vulnerabilities to focus on before the test starts. It means that testers can rapidly test against realistic and dangerous scenarios and more accurately replicate advanced threats within a test's scope.
When a company invests in security consulting prior to a pen test, the results of a testing engagement will generally be more detailed, easier to act on and more conclusive.
The fundamental benefit of security consulting is that there will be fewer “known unknowns” at the end of a testing period.
The Security Consulting Feedback Loop
Aside from "getting a better test," a consulting engagement will help a business integrate security insights into strategic planning.
Consultants can clarify an application’s real security risks, control gaps, and the kind of threats it will face in the wild. These insights help make the application more secure in the near term and can also be used in follow-up design and implementation stages to improve its overall security.
A security consulting engagement can kickstart a positive security feedback loop.
Expert insights can inform strategic planning and decision-making. One of the best outcomes is that businesses can see how to align their security strategy with their overall business goals and prioritise security initiatives.
Businesses use consulting to bring security issues to the attention of senior decision-makers and showcase the business role that security investment plays.
Understanding Interconnected Systems
Security consultancy is particularly important when testing critical, complex systems, such as online banking systems.
The core reason why is that systems like this are rarely standalone applications; they typically interface with multiple other systems, featuring both internal endpoints and endpoints exposed to the open web.
In these cases, a consultancy phase can give the penetration tester the ability to go beyond testing just the visible aspects of a web application.
For example, consultancy time can be spent engaging with the critical application’s development team, which gives testers a chance to do a deep dive into the application’s architecture. This includes understanding how the system integrates with others and the controls governing data flow and communication.
With some consulting time, testers can gain insights into the overall system architecture, which can help understand how different components interact and where potential vulnerabilities may lie.
Do All Penetration Tests Need Cybersecurity Consulting?
No, not necessarily.
Consulting may not be necessary for small-scope penetration tests. An example is a simple web page form with limited back-end connectivity.
As a rule, cybersecurity consultancy makes the most sense when testing a critical system with a relatively large scope. Critical customer-facing applications with multiple user paths or database connectivities are a good example.
2 Core Benefits of Pre-Test Cybersecurity Consultancy
There are two main benefits of cybersecurity consultancy prior to testing. These are:
- Holistic approach
Security consultancy can give you a road map to building a stronger overall security posture.
A consultancy phase can create a detailed map of threats and vulnerabilities surrounding the actual application being tested. This means you can get clear recommendations for additional tests of controls in other critical areas.
For example, if a risk assessment of a critical application reveals high-risk areas in data communication or internal endpoints, the consultant might advise focusing on these areas during the testing phase.
Expert-led holistic security advice like this can also give you extra insight into how cybercriminals look at your organisation. The people trying to steal your company’s data or compromise your operations will find the path of least resistance to compromising critical applications.
Determined threat actors will spend time learning about your critical systems before they try to hack into them. Security consultancy shows you those attack vectors and how to protect them before cybercriminals get there.
- In-depth testing
All good penetration tests are in-depth, but while a typical penetration test might, due to the natural limits of scope and time, only address surface-level issues found on the first layer of an application, a consultancy phase allows testers to uncover deeper systemic risks.
With some time spent on consultancy before a test, a tester can immediately be aware of the areas where security controls may be weak or data flows might be vulnerable to interception or manipulation.
SECFORCE Offers Cybersecurity Consulting Alongside Penetration Testing
A security consulting engagement with SECFORCE gives you the best offensive security support in the market.
Our team can do advanced cybersecurity consulting to understand the business impact and root cause of potential risks to your organisation and give you recommendations at a process and policy level to fix them.
We have a range of specialist offensive security consulting teams with expertise in areas ranging from IoT devices to regulatory compliance.
