While the end of the year looms, security teams are busy closing out projects before the holiday season. One of our clients, a large multinational company, has a requirement to have a large number of assets tested annually for vulnerabilities by an external provider, adding to the end-of-year task list.
Our client faced a situation where they had a large number of assets that needed testing in the final months of the year. In this situation, a traditional pentesting model struggles to scale. A pentester, or even a small team of pentesters, can only work so fast: All you can do is prioritize your key assets and work through the rest as quickly as you can. Or throw more money at the problem by bringing in additional pentesters, if they’re even available.
Synack’s model is different. The Synack Platform provides a scalable means for clients to prepare and manage their assessment requests, as well as to track progress on their annual compliance requirements. Our global community of skilled, vetted researchers allows our clients to scale testing on-demand to meet peaks within the business cycle. In this case, we more than doubled the number of concurrent assessments running within the space of a month.
How We Scale Your Pentesting In a Pinch
The Synack Platform plays a key role in enabling scaling security testing quickly and effectively. Individual subsidiaries of a company are able to request testing for specific assets by providing the relevant data through the client portal.
At Synack, we refer to a test of one or a group of assets as an “assessment.” Once an assessment is submitted, the assets are scoped by our Security Operations Engineers to provide a clear and well-documented scope for the Synack Red Team (SRT), our community of 1,500 security researchers. Then we propose a schedule and associated Rules of Engagement, the terms SRT must follow to participate in an assessment.
Once the client agrees to the schedule, these assessments comprise 7-10 days of testing, combining both our SmartScan® technology as well as testing by SRT. Once an assessment is running, the client has the ability to pause it through the portal as well as send messages to SRT researchers to direct their attention to key features or areas of interest.
Remediate Vulns with the Same Speed as Testing
The portal provides users with instant access to reports on vulnerabilities uncovered by our SRT as soon as those have been reviewed and approved by our Vulnerability Operations Team. These reports can be anything from a one-page executive summary for C-suite readers to an in-depth technical walkthrough of the steps to reproduce the vulnerability as well as the measures to take to remediate it.
Reports are ideal for the engineering teams responsible for developing and maintaining the assets, helping them quickly understand and solve any security flaws identified. Once the development teams have fixed the vulnerabilities, the client also has the ability to request “Patch Verification” through the portal. Patch verifications will usually be conducted by the SRT member who found the vulnerability, confirming if it is fixed or if the issue persists.
To learn more about how Synack’s scalable capabilities can meet your security and compliance needs, contact us.
