Web Application

What Is It?

A web application is a resource accessed through a web browser and is typically hosted remotely to where the user is accessing it from, this could be across the Internet or across an organisations internal network. Web applications serve a purpose to both the organisation who has deployed them as well as the users, such as conducting their job role or purchasing a service or product.

Why Assess It?

There are many reasons to conduct a web application security assessment, five of which are below.

Prominent Attack Surface

Web applications are by their very nature exposed and simple to discover when placed on the Internet, meaning that threat actors also discover these in their early stages of an attack. When this is combined by the nature in which web applications are made, by human developers who code functionality, it is easy to understand why they are a worthwhile target for threat actors to pursue.

Protect Reputation

As web applications are generally exposed over the Internet, they are a showcase for your organisation including its understanding of cyber security. A poorly secured web application can not only taint your reputation with customers and other users but can provide motivation for threat actors as they look to sift through and find easy targets to achieve their objectives.

Confidence Through Competence

Users of web applications are increasingly security aware, for example people understand what a good and bad password policy looks like and often check what information you collect before interacting with your organisation. Ensuring your application rigorously stands up to these security tests can give you a competitive advantage over other organisations.

Secure Organisational Operations

Every web application serves a purpose for your organisation. Ensuring it remains operational and free from adverse security events which undermine the data processed within it and its links to other internal systems is critical.

Avoid Penalties and Fines

Given the exposure of web applications to threat actors and the likelihood of vulnerabilities being discovered, the impact of a breach could be severe. This impact would not be solely operational and reputational as various bodies can issue fines. The UK’s Information Commissioners Office (ICO) can issue fines up to £17.5m or 4% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher.

The Agility Cyber Approach

Like all our engagements, we want you to get the most out of your web application security assessment and we do this by:

Threat Actor Simulation

We do not just run an application vulnerability scanner and report, we use prior knowledge and a deep understanding of security concepts to creatively find ways of subverting security controls in your web application against objectives that a real world threat actor would have.

Prioritised and Pragmatic Advice

We report what we find but we do not add issues to make the numbers up. We believe in identifying the patterns that affect your web application and helping you to fix their root cause, ensuring you get a higher return on investment in the assessment and for any remediation effort deployed by your teams.

Pull On Loose Strings

The purpose of emulating a threat actor is to ensure that the full extent of what is possible is understood. We do not just report a high level finding like a patch is missing with an arbitrary severity rating. We take the time to probe further and, with your agreement, exploit it so that we can give an accurate severity rating and potentially uncover further vulnerabilities from any additional privilege or access achieved.

Empathy with Developers

We know that having something you have put effort into undergo a security review is challenging and we go to great lengths to work alongside your developers and project managers to provide the best help possible, such as providing code snippets that can be used instead of just high level advice.

Multi-Faceted Assessment

We do not just look at the web application itself as it is residing on infrastructure linked to your organisation and the risks need to be viewed in combination and not in an isolated fashion. We check what the infrastructure is exposing, how it has been secured and the underlying components of the web application, such as the modules it uses and the server technology stack.

Benefits of Partnering with Agility Cyber

Mutually Invested

Our experts work with you, not against you. There are no egotistical celebrations when a serious issue is discovered, just rapid full disclosure with pragmatic suggestions for effective remediation followed by ongoing support.

Clarity and Simplicity

We always provide clarity, believe in simplicity and value your time. An example is rather than waiting until the engagement starts, we will conduct open source intelligence gathering activities before the scoping meeting to help us understand your organisations position and risk posture thus enabling us to ask better questions, securing you higher value and saving you time.

Full Consultancy

Our team, based in the UK, is technically exceptional but we pair that with business sense to discover, triage and help you remediate the full range of security issues.

Impartiality

We are impartial, we do not sell you products or the latest buzzword laden trending solution.

Outstanding Service

We have an industry leading turnaround, agility is in our name after all. Proposals are shared with you within 24 hours of the scoping meeting. Accurate and complete daily debriefs are given during every engagement. The report is shared within 5 working days at the latest.

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