IT INFRASTRUCTURE AUDIT- PROTECTING SOFTWARE PRODUCTS WITH OUR 5 SCAN CYCLE ASSESSMENT

Vulnerability exposure attacks on IT infrastructure are pretty common in today’s world. To secure their infrastructures, each organization must carry out vulnerability assessments regularly.

The Case

This particular case study focuses on one of our clients that provides various software services all around the world, as well as providing vulnerability assessments and audits for all their provided software and products.

All these software and services were based on different individual businesses spreading across a variety of domains. The challenge for the team was to understand the risks in each of the domains and evaluate all the software based on the assessment report.

Tools & Technologies We Used For The Process

These are the tools we used for the complete infrastructure assessment:

• Cisco VPN and Firewall
• Kali Linux
• Okta Verify
• TCPDump
• Veracode
• Wireshark

How We Solved The Issue

Here’s how we handled the entire situation once we were ready with all the necessary tools

Complete Evaluation

To begin the process, we performed a complete evaluation of the client-side system architecture. The elements of this evaluation include:

• Firewalls
• Networks
• OS
• Protocols Used
• Servers
• VPNs

The CISCO Firewall at the client’s end wasn’t compliant with the global security policies. Through our assessment, we set up the correct parameters that define and comply with international rules.

Mail Communication Fix

The mail communication system of the client didn’t have any kind of specific rules. We took note of all the communication parameters and set the rules accordingly.

One of these rules was to reject attachments that contained files with potentially harmful file extensions (.exe in our client’s case). When such a mail is in question, the mail sending is failed and it also triggers an alert on the client’s side as a precaution.

Network and OS

The incoming and outgoing networks had some suspicious activity, so to ensure safety we ran a network sniffing check on both incoming and outgoing

Once the network was ready, we turned our attention to the underlying OS. There were a few servers that were running on Windows OS, including service pack updates. Our client used Cisco VPN for the servers without any kind of authentication in place.

We used Okta Verify to add a two-factor authentication with the VPN.

Application & Web Servers

There were many potentially harmful commands at play in both the client's applications and web servers. We collected all these servers to a firewall that had restrictive incoming and outgoing traffic. We also disabled automatic web connection opening to minimize vulnerable spots.

After completing the infrastructural evaluation, we proceeded to scan all applications for the codes that were deployed in the UAT environment.

We performed 3 days of automation testing before our security experts started a manual assessment. Once the manual assessment was completed, they submitted a report with suggestions for fixes that could mitigate the detected issues.

Result

We completed the entire scanning process in 5 scan cycles. After the cycles were complete, the applications achieved a score of 92%

Even after the IT Infrastructure audit was done, we continued to carry out timely assessments at regular intervals due to requests from the client.

We ran quarterly checks to ensure the same was safe and held up against all the security threats and vulnerability risks.

Conclusion

Our client had immense trust in our vulnerability assessment services and continued to reach out to us to carry out more checks before each new software code or patch release.

A steady rate and pace of vulnerability assessments have helped our client showcase their credibility in front of both the clientele and the business associates.