Triaging the Enterprise for Application Security Assessments

Conducting a full array of security tests on all applications in an enterprise may be infeasible due to both time and cost. According to the Center for Internet Security, the purpose of application specific and penetration testing is to discover previously unknown vulnerabilities and security gaps within the enterprise. These activities are only warranted after an organization attains significant security maturity, which results in a large backlog of systems that need testing. When organizations finally undertake the efforts of penetration testing and application security, it can be difficult to choose where to begin. Computing environments are often filled with hundreds or thousands of different systems to test and each test can be long and costly. At this point in the testing process, little information is available about an application beyond the computers involved, the owners, data classification, and the extent to which the system is exposed. With so few variables, many systems are likely to have equal priority. This paper suggests a battery of technical checks that testers can quickly perform to stratify the vast array of applications that exist in the enterprise ecosystem. This process allows the security team to focus efforts on the riskiest systems first.