Cloud technology has afforded organizations the ability to operate dynamically and build new technologies quickly while keeping costs low. However, as organizations move away from on-premises IT infrastructure, they may lose visibility into their new cloud-based assets. 

Cloud environments, such as the big three cloud providers (Amazon, Google and Microsoft), vastly differ from provider to provider. Large organizations likely have assets in more than one cloud environment, which creates a challenge for security teams. Specialized knowledge is needed to ensure proper configuration across cloud environments, otherwise it’s easy to lose track of existing assets and their conditions.

The likelihood that a cloud container (or bucket or blob) is improperly configured, exposing assets to the public internet, is high. One checkbox missed when setting up an application in a cloud environment could expose information unknowingly. 

This is why security teams need access to offensive security testing that provides the specific expertise needed per cloud provider. 

How Synack Solves for Pentesting in the Cloud

Enter the Synack Red Team (SRT) and platform. The SRT is a community of more than 1,500 security researchers, each chosen for their skillset, resulting in a large, diverse pool to perform pentests or other security testing for the cloud. 

When setting up an SRT engagement with Synack, we’ll find the right security researchers with expertise tailored to your cloud or multi-cloud environment. We also handle dynamic IPs–often associated with cloud environments–with ease, updating the scope of a project every night so that deployed SRT researchers stay on target.

Whether you need IT infrastructure checked in your Microsoft Azure environment or important assets reviewed in Amazon S3 buckets, the Synack Platform has you covered. After SRT reports are vetted for high impact misconfigurations and exploitable vulnerabilities, the platform delivers reports with as much or as little detail as needed. You can also request a patch verification within the platform to ensure any remediations or reconfigurations really worked.

With Synack, you can see security trends over time. If you’re just beginning your digital transformation—moving from on-prem to the cloud—or your organization has spent years building cloud infrastructure and applications, you need to be able to demonstrate to leadership that your security measures are effective. 

From round-the-clock coverage to one-off cloud vuln checklists, Synack can sniff out exploitable vulnerabilities and help you, through data and proof-of-work, build a hardened cloud attack surface.

The post Untangling Your Cloud Assets with Offensive Security Testing appeared first on Synack.

The Synack Platform can help you check all your compliance boxes. Need a yearly pentest? We’ve got you covered. Need reports that compliance auditors and executives can easily understand? Find them in the Platform after testing is complete. 

But when you use Synack’s capabilities only to satisfy compliance requirements, you’re missing out on the benefits of continuous offensive security testing. Synack CEO, Jay Kaplan, says it best, “You are getting scanned every day by bad actors, you just don’t receive the report.” 

As new vulnerabilities are disclosed, hackers are scanning your attack surface within 15 minutes. And with widespread, exploitable software flaws like Log4j, it will take years for security teams to find and remediate all the vulnerable instances in their networks. 

Synack’s continuous pentesting gives you the peace of mind of having your attack surface monitored year-round. Compliance checks might get you out of hot water with your auditor, but continuous coverage keeps you ahead of bad actors looking for a way into your systems. 

Deficiencies of Traditional Pentesting and Scanners

Point-in-time pentests are snapshots and don’t provide a comprehensive security assessment of dynamic environments. You need a process that will live and breathe like your organization does. If you’re sending out continuous updates to your web or mobile applications, you need continuous coverage, especially when those applications store sensitive customer data

As for scanning tools, they do provide continuous testing, but their results are limited to known vulnerabilities and produce a lot of noise or false positives. This creates a heavy burden for members of your security team, who might be feeling the effects of burnout like many others in the field. They must sift through the noise to find the vulnerabilities that are a) critical and b) can actually be exploited, which takes time and concentration. 

Instead, you could have Synack’s Red Team (SRT) and Vulnerability Operations finding, verifying and providing recommended fixes for the most critical and exploitable vulnerabilities in your system throughout the year. When it comes time for the compliance audit, you will be ready to hand over the report with evidence that the vulnerabilities found were successfully patched without a gap in coverage. And while your customers may never know that your testing program is comprehensive, they won’t see you suffering a data breach. 

Go Beyond Pentesting with the Synack Red Team & On-demand Security Tasks

The SRT can be activated for more than just open vulnerability discovery. In addition to creating reports from frameworks like the OWASP Top 10, they can check for best practice implementations with ASVS. Additionally, the Synack Platform can facilitate efficient zero day response in the wake of critical vulnerabilities like Log4j. These, in addition to other on-demand security tasks are launched through the Synack Catalog, enabled by our credits system. Watch a demo here.

Companies need agile security to keep the business safe without slowing it down. With Synack, you can quickly scale testing to your needs, receive actionable reports from the results and verify remediation of vulnerabilities. 

The post Get More Out of the Synack Platform, Not Just Reports for Compliance appeared first on Synack.

It’s natural to wonder who makes up the Synack Red Team (SRT), our dedicated team of 1,500+ security researchers, and how they ended up finding vulnerabilities in our customers’ IT systems (with permission, of course). 

Companies want assurance they’re not opening the front door to just anybody. Much like you wouldn’t want a stranger in your home without a warm introduction from a mutual friend, we’ll explain how SRT researchers become part of an elite, global community of ethical hackers with diverse skill sets. 

Becoming an SRT Member Requires Building Trust 

One of the strengths of the SRT comes from its diverse community; our SRT members are top researchers in their respective fields—academia, government and the private sector. They hail from countries all around the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Human ingenuity takes many forms, and it’s that richness of difference that makes the SRT able to take on a seemingly endless list of security testing and tasks. 

Before joining the team, each prospective SRT member must first complete a 5-step vetting process that is designed to assess skill and trustworthiness. Historically, less than 10% of applicants have been accepted into the SRT, as we strive to add only those trusted individuals who will contribute positive results without excess noise to the platform. While our process loosely resembles bug bounty models, Synack sets the bar higher. 

Synack’s community team monitors online behavior from SRT members and removes SRT members immediately when required. Synack maintains a common standard and reward level across the SRT, allowing our clients to benefit from the clear understanding and agreement between SRT members and Synack for what constitutes a thorough report deserving of a high reward. They have collectively earned millions of dollars and have found thousands of vulnerabilities for Synack clients, including the U.S. Army and Air Force, the Centers for Disease Control and Protection and the Internal Revenue Service. 

Baking “Trust But Verify” Into the Process 

The Synack Platform ultimately powers our researchers. Synack works closely with clients to accurately scope testing and instruct them on how to use the Platform effectively. 

The Platform is also where SRT researchers submit findings to be triaged by our Vulnerability Operations team. VulnOps ensures that quality results are delivered to the client in a variety of formats (e.g. easily digestible reports, integration of data into existing security software). Clients are also able to communicate directly with researchers for questions or follow up. 

All SRT traffic goes through Synack’s VPN LaunchPoint to provide control and assurance around pentesting traffic. LaunchPoint focuses penetration testing traffic through one source, pauses or stops testing at the push of a button, provides complete visibility into the researcher’s testing activity with full packet capture, time-stamps traffic for auditing purposes and allows for data cleansing and deletion of sensitive customer data by Synack after it is no longer needed for testing.

Synack Works with Top Government and Private Sector Clients

Setting the bar higher allows Synack to work with clients who need additional assurance. Recently, we completed the requirements to achieve our FedRAMP Moderate “In Progress” level, which allows us to work with almost any U.S. federal agency. In past years, we’ve participated in Hack the Pentagon and several public hacking competitions for U.S. defense agencies, such as a 2019 effort in Las Vegas to find critical weaknesses in the F-15 fighter jet.

Malicious actors don’t need any clearance to hack into systems. Synack takes the task of combatting those bad actors seriously and our teams–from the Red Team to VulnOps–have worked to ensure that our clients receive vulnerability reports with actionable, secure information. We continue to innovate in the security testing and pentesting-as-a-service industry, ensuring privacy and security for all our clients while providing clear visibility into all testing through our trusted technology.

Interested in our work with the public sector? Click here.

The post Building Trust with a Vetted Team of Security Researchers appeared first on Synack.

Security is too often an afterthought in the software development process. It’s easy to understand why: Application and software developers are tasked with getting rid of bugs and adding in new features in updates that must meet a grueling release schedule. 

Asking to include security testing before an update is deployed can bring up problems needing to be fixed. In an already tight timeline, that creates tension between developers and the security team. 

If you’re using traditional pentesting methods, the delays and disruption are too great to burden the development team, who are likely working a continuous integration and continuous delivery process (CI/CD). Or if you’re using an automatic scanner to detect potential vulnerabilities, you’re receiving a long list of low-level vulns that obscures the most critical issues to address first. 

Instead, continuous pentesting, or even scanning for a particular CVE, can harmonize development and security teams. And it’s increasingly important. A shocking 85% of commercial apps contain at least one critical vulnerability, according to a 2021 report, while 100% use open-source software, such as the now infamous Log4j. That’s not to knock on open-source software, but rather to say that a critical vulnerability can pop up at any time and it’s more likely to happen than not. 

If a critical vulnerability is found–or worse, exploited–the potential fines or settlement from a data breach could be astronomical. In the latest data breach settlement, T-Mobile agreed to pay $350 million to customers in a class action lawsuit and invest additional $150 million in their data security operations.

This is why many companies are hiring for development security operations (DevSecOps). The people in these roles work in concert with the development team to build a secure software development process into the existing deployment schedule. But with 700,000 infosec positions sitting open in the United States, it might be hard to find the right candidate. 

If you want to improve the security of your software and app development, here are some tips from Synack customers: 

• Highlight only the most critical vulns to the dev team. The development team has time only to address what’s most important. Sorting through an endless list of vulns that might never be exploited won’t work. Synack delivers vulnerabilities that matter by incentivizing our researchers to focus on finding severe vulnerabilities.

• Don’t shame, celebrate. Mistakes are inevitable. Instead of shaming or blaming the development team for a security flaw, cheer on the wins. Finding and fixing vulnerabilities before an update is released is a cause for celebration. Working together to protect the company’s reputation and your customers’ data is the shared goal. 

• Embrace the pace. CI/CD isn’t going away and the key to deploying more secure apps and software is to find ways to work with developers. When vulns are found to be fixed, document the process for next time. And if there’s enough time, try testing for specific, relevant CVEs. Synack Red Team (SRT) members document their path to finding and exploiting vulnerabilities and can verify patches were implemented successfully. SRT security researchers can also test as narrow or broad a scope as you’d like with Synack’s testing offerings and catalog of specific checks, such as CVE and zero day checks.

Security is a vital component to all companies’ IT infrastructure, but it can’t stand in the way of the business. For more information about how Synack can help you integrate security checkpoints in your dev process, request a demo.

The post Testing Early and Often Can Reduce Flaws in App Development appeared first on Synack.

Government agencies and public sector organizations have often struggled to compete with private companies for talent, a struggle only exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. A recent  Bureau of Labor Statistics report found that about half of government jobs in the U.S. remain unfilled compared to pre-pandemic numbers. 

This creates an even tighter squeeze on the already spent cybersecurity workforce; the White House reported a staggering 700,000 open cybersecurity roles in the U.S. The public sector continues to battle smaller budgets and fewer technical resources, while the challenge to protect the attack surface and anticipate new vulnerabilities becomes increasingly complex. 

Public-private partnerships can alleviate the pressure felt by the public sector globally by infusing top-tier talent into critical cybersecurity operations and providing consistent, readily available technology and support.

Government and public sector organizations are charged with keeping a country’s digital borders safe and secure. They’re needed to help keep the lights on, along with a myriad of other critical functions. To do that, organizations routinely test the health of their cybersecurity defenses. But are they getting the results and insight to keep up with today’s sophisticated cyber adversaries?  

Stale security practices keep public sector organizations in the past at a time when they need partners to help them operate on par with private companies.

Penetration testing, otherwise known as pentesting, is a technology that is fortunately evolving for the better.

Gone are the days of two people on-site with two laptops who take weeks to deliver a point-in-time report with few actionable insights. 

Here’s what modern pentesting can look like: a continuous process to sniff out critical vulnerabilities as they’re known, actionable results built into a seamless platform, and an ability to scale to respond to critical vulnerabilities like Log4j.   

The choice between outdated security testing and an agile, responsive pentesting solution to tackle a nation’s most pressing cybersecurity concerns is obvious. Synack provides premier security testing to keep public sector organizations at the top of their game, reducing risk while helping to keep critical data and infrastructure out of adversaries’ hands. Our innovative pentesting solution utilizes the Synack Red Team, a diverse community of more than 1,500 security researchers, and our secure platform to dig deep into web applications, cloud resources and other attack surfaces to find the vulnerabilities that matter most.  

Our recent whitepaper, “Government Agencies Deserve a Better Way to Pentest,” lays out the challenge with traditional pentesting and how public sector organizations can respond with maximum efficiency and limited budget. 

For U.S. government agencies

For U.K. public sector organisations 

The post No Time to Waste: Why the Public Sector Needs a Better Way to Pentest appeared first on Synack.