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Five Signs Your Application Security Assessment Process Needs a Reboot
Many organizations use manually intensive processes when onboarding their application security assessments. Compare the following process with your own experience:
- Schedule the application security assessment.
- Assign internal/external penetration testers to conduct the test.
- Conduct the application security assessment and/or vulnerability scan.
- Report application vulnerabilities to the remediation team using a method of copy-and-paste. from various systems.
- Report multiple duplicates and false positives that had been verified previously.
With a process like the one above, your organization will struggle with delayed timelines and duplicate efforts. And because the process is manual, each step in your lifecycle is prone to human-error. In highly regulated industries, this wasteful approach consumes valuable resources, when resources are already lacking.
Ask the following five questions to assess the strength of your organization’s vulnerability management program:
- Does your organization have multiple ways for application owners to request application assessments?
- Do you struggle to scope the assessment properly? For example, can you acquire details such as how dynamic pages are within your web app, the number of user roles, the application’s code language, etc.?
- Do you have to follow-up with the application owners for more information or direction after the scoping questionnaires are emailed to the pentesting team?
- After receiving completed questionnaires, do you send login credentials via email to conduct authenticated application security tests?
- Do you email the pentesting team a copy of the concluded assessment results, regardless of the type of test: static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST) or a manual penetration test?
If you rely on email and manual processes like these for your vulnerability management program, it is probably time for a vulnerability management program overhaul!
Reduce Your Administrative Overhead by 40% to 60%
Even without the headache of sifting through duplicate findings and incurring delays, we have found that organizations can spend a from 6 to 10 hours onboarding applications into the vulnerability assessment process. Organizations we’ve interviewed say this massive administrative overhead is reduced by 40%-60% with NetSPI Resolve™, the first commercially available security testing automation and vulnerability correlation software platform.
NetSPI Resolve reduces the time required to identify and remediate vulnerabilities, providing pentesters and their teams with comprehensive automated reporting, ticketing, and SLA management. By utilizing these Resolve features, along with the automation of questionnaire publication, organizations achieve streamlined communication and can complete vulnerability assessments faster, without sacrificing the quality of assessment results.
By reducing – and in some cases, even eliminating – the time needed for administrative tasks, pentesters are able to focus more on what they do best: test.
