Vulnerability assessment Singapore: The complete checklist

• 24 January, 2022
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Vulnerability assessment Singapore: The complete checklist

With organizations increasingly relying on information technology to gain a competitive edge, keeping the IT infrastructure secure should be one of the top responsibilities. Leaving security flaws unsolved and accessible for hackers to exploit can result in significant monetary and reputational harm.

Vulnerability assessment is a technique used by Organizations to discover security vulnerabilities in IT systems or assess the application’s security resiliency.

A vulnerability assessment is a process of identifying and classifying security flaws in online applications that a bad actor may possibly exploit. The evaluation is performed manually and supplemented by commercial or open-source scanning programs to ensure maximum coverage. 

Without such assessments, there is a risk that IT infrastructure is not sufficiently secured. It is recommended that organizations perform a vulnerability assessment on their IT infrastructure on a quarterly basis and assess their applications on a yearly basis. This critical checklist is your playbook when thoroughly testing a web application for security issues.

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The complete security vulnerability assessment checklist

Before the assessment

• Conduct test preparation meetings. Demonstrate the application, define the scope of the future penetration exam, and go over the test environment setup.
• Create a threat model. Target targeted regions to find the greatest number of high-severity vulnerabilities in the shortest amount of time.
• Conduct developer interviews. Learn everything there is to know about the application.
• Verify the test environment’s specifications. Confirm URLs, VPN access, credentials, and so forth.

Automated dynamic scanning

• Select an automatic scanning method. Depending on the application framework, select a suitable commercial or open-source security scanning tool to achieve maximum coverage (e.g., Burp Suite Pro, IBM Rational AppScan, HP Fortify On Demand, etc.).
• Scan the application. This type of testing can reveal a wide range of typical security flaws.

Manual testing

• Carry out injection and XSS testing. Examine injection issues such as SQL, JSON, XML, and LDAP injections. Examine the application’s input points for cross-site scripting (XSS). Check to see if forms are sent safely and without tampering.
• Perform authentication and authorization tests. Examine for insufficient authentication mechanisms, incorrect access control definitions, and malfunctioning login procedures.
• Audit session administration. Examine the secure session IDs/cookies. Look for cases of cross-site request forgery (CSRF).
• Look into sensitive information exposure. Confirm that no sensitive information is exposed as a result of incorrect NPI data storage, faulty error handling, unsecured direct object references, or comments in source code.
• Check the secure configuration. Ensure that security configurations are not developed and deployed with the default values.
• Carry out security testing at the transport layer. Check for flawed encryption methods, and that ciphers are utilized for safeguarding communication routes.
• Perform application spidering. Investigate the application for novel methods to circumvent security restrictions.

During testing

• Triangle results. Manually verify scan findings to distinguish real positives from false positives.
• Gather proof. Take suitable pictures or otherwise capture the processes to recreate an exploit and correctly develop a proof of concept.

After testing

• Complete report writing. Create a report of all the results based on their risk level using a common template.
• Communicate with stakeholders. Allow testers to assist diverse stakeholders in understanding and justifying the risk associated with each discovery.

Beyond the checklist

As you can see, a comprehensive application security program consists of a variety of safety procedures and techniques. Once the project has been scoped out, your team must determine which portions of the program have high-severity vulnerabilities.

So, now that you’ve got a vital vulnerability assessment checklist, how do you get the job started? Begin your next vulnerability assessment with a threat model and lead your team to triumph over security flaws.

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