Scope: Client-Side Infrastructure Security Review & Remediation
Summary: I was engaged by a client to independently validate and expand upon a vulnerability assessment report previously conducted by a third-party contractor. The report focused on seven interconnected web applications, each with unique objectives and security profiles critical to the client’s infrastructure.
Tasks:
- Review the original vulnerability assessment report
- Validate findings and assess accuracy
- Conduct a deeper, independent security audit
- Identify overlooked vulnerabilities
- Develop and execute a comprehensive remediation plan
- Coordinate with the original assessment team for final verification
Actions:
While the third-party report covered surface-level issues, it missed a dozen+ critical vulnerabilities—primarily due to a lack of familiarity with the underlying CMS technologies (primarily WordPress) and custom application logic. For example:
- No enumeration or assessment of vulnerable WordPress plugins
- No review of insecure custom logic and business workflows
- Lack of testing around access control and input sanitization
Additionally, I worked directly with the businesses internal teams over a mutli week engagement performing actions like:
- Manually validated each finding from the original report and expanded coverage with my own black-box and white-box testing
- Conducted a CMS-aware audit, discovering misconfigurations, outdated components, and plugin vulnerabilities
- Reverse-engineered custom application flows to uncover logic flaws and insecure implementations
- Created a prioritized remediation gameplan, balancing business risk and development effort
- Remediated vulnerabilities directly by patching code, hardening server configurations, and removing insecure plugins
- Worked with the original assessment vendor to verify that all issues had been mitigated to their satisfaction
Results:
All sites were successfully hardened, patched, and revalidated, improving the client’s security posture significantly. This engagement emphasized my ability to critically evaluate third-party assessments, identify gaps, and provide end-to-end remediation and coordination with multiple stakeholders The 3rd party security auditing team confirmed and validated the remediation and controls I implemented, concluding the engagement.
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