Penetration testers assume the role of an unauthenticated user or an authenticated, but untrusted user—or perhaps both—and attempt to gain unauthorized access or use the application in unintended ways.
By identifying and remediating these discovered vulnerabilities, you would improve your application security and reduce the risk of a real-world attacker exploiting them first.
Different industries have specific regulatory compliance requirements which may include penetration testing. Depending on the framework(s) your organization is attempting to comply with, an application penetration test may be mandatory.
Conducting regular penetration tests can demonstrate to customers, partners, and other stakeholders, that you take security seriously and are taking consistent steps to protect data.
At Schellman, we use the OWASP Web Security Testing Guide in our web application testing. In order for us understand the specific risks for each particular application, much of our testing is done manually while conducting vulnerability scanning so that we can review how an application responds to traffic submitted in unintended ways.
Schellman does perform web application penetration testing—our Penetration Testing Team continues to grow and is currently comprised of individuals from different backgrounds including former developers, system administrators, and lifelong security professionals. Our team is incredibly experienced, and collectively holds the following professional certifications, among others:
Typically, we find that web application assessments take 2 – 6 weeks depending on complexity and feature set.
You can expect to pay no less than $30,000 for an authenticated web application penetration test with us, though the scope of your assessment always determines the final price.
Sometimes called an instance, a tenant is a term used to describe a single customer’s environment within your application. Different applications will break down tenancy in different ways—yours may separate tenants into individual client organizations, and or perhaps different tenants are different teams that each contain individual users assigned within a team.
If that’s the case, to thoroughly test your application for business logic and authorization issues, we would need you to provision us two tenants—consider it like “onboarding” two new customers. Using these two separate roles, we’ll be able to tell you whether Tenant A can access data or make changes to Tenant B and ensure that these different areas/user accounts/tenants are each secure.
Using these different accounts, we’re able to assess the security of the web application from different perspectives and identify potential vulnerabilities that may be present based on different levels of access and privilege.
By not allowing our public IP addresses past your technical security controls during a pen test, you will diminish the overall value gained from the engagement. Remember, a real-world attacker has unlimited time to bypass your controls, but the pen test will always be a timeboxed assessment—when a web application firewall (WAF) or other security controls are in place, they will prevent us from fully evaluating the web application and its supporting infrastructure.
Additionally, your compliance requirements may require you to disable these controls.