Application
Penetration
Testing

Exploiting real-world threat scenarios to secure
your organisation’s applications.

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Application Penetration Testing assesses the security posture of your web and mobile applications, APIs, or thick client against the same tools and techniques used by cyber attackers.

Using sophisticated automated and manual testing methods, we can identify and demonstrate real-world attack scenarios that could be used to compromise the security of the user data, your organisation’s data, or the device the application runs on.

With an attacker perspective, you will gain critical insights into the true business impact of existing vulnerabilities, and obtain a comprehensive understanding of your application’s full attack surface area in order to build a more resilient cybersecurity landscape.

JDS Application Penetration Testing Services

Web applications are widely used throughout organisations to service clients, staff, and other infrastructures, and are therefore prime targets for threat actors.

Threat actors could leverage intercepted or otherwise stolen information for financial gain, business disruption, or other criminal activities.

Web Application Penetration Testing is a process of identifying and, where in scope, exploiting vulnerabilities found in the application.

Utilizing modern techniques, tools, and methodologies to assess the overall security posture of the web application, JDS will simulate a real-world attack, including Authenticated Testing (Grey Box) and Un-authenticated Testing (Black Box).

This process includes testing the web application’s input validation, authentication, and access controls, as well as other common web vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and file inclusion.

In modern web applications APIs can make up the bulk of the way data is transferred and modified. As such, they are a prime target for threat actors to be able to steal, modify or delete data that is important to business functionality.

Given that APIs are a key component in almost all web and mobile applications, it is critical that API penetration testing be considered in your security testing strategy.

The purpose of an API penetration test is to identify and demonstrate real-world attack scenarios that could be used to compromise the security of the application’s API calls.

The comprehensive JDS approach involves testing for API vulnerabilities such as injection, input validation, authentication, session management, and access controls. Where possible, the configuration of the application and its API will be evaluated.

Once the findings are delivered, remediation can be prioritised to improve any discovered API compliance vulnerabilities and security gaps.

Mobile applications are now seen as business-critical channels by many organisations, as they offer a convenient way to engage customers, to manage staff and to interact with businesses. However, for a mobile application to support the confidentiality, integrity and availability of a system and it’s data, a specialised assessment is required to validate the security controls of the mobile application. This security assessment is known as mobile application penetration testing.

A mobile application penetration test not only looks at the source configuration and API calls, but also tests the application’s network communication, data storage, and interactions with a device’s operating system, intended or otherwise.

Regular mobile application penetration testing is a crucial security measure to identify and mitigate any potential vulnerabilities in mobile applications, which could lead to damaging downtime and costly data breaches.

A Thick Client, also known as a Fat Client, is an application that, independent of the server to provide data, has most of its major processing and functionality done on the client side.

While Thick Client Applications are useful and provide a great user experience, exploitable vulnerabilities can exist on both the local and server side, which results in the attack surface being larger and requiring a different, more complex approach than web application penetration testing.

The JDS approach to testing both Two-Tier and Three-Tier Thick Client Applications is to identify and demonstrate real-world attack scenarios that could be used to compromise the security of the device hosting the Thick Client Application. This includes the security of the data and functionality of the application itself, and the security of the application server and/or database.

When carrying out a Secure Code Review, JDS perform a systematic and thorough examination of application source code for the purpose of identifying security vulnerabilities.

We then determine how these vulnerabilities may interact with other aspects of the application and its connected infrastructures, such as communications with servers, devices, databases, or even other applications.

A Secure Source Code Review can be executed on any of your applications, including Mobile, Web, and Thick applications.

“The JDS Security team were responsive, positive and engaging to work with. They took time to understand our requirements and shared valuable insights on best practice, which was great to consider as part of our solution.”

– Application Owner, Training and Education

“The JDS pen testing group was professional, skilled and delivered a high quality outcome. They identified a number of vulnerabilities that we were previously unaware of, and explained their findings and remediation recommendations in a clear and comprehensive style. We will be relying on JDS for all of our future application pen testing assessments.”

– CTO, Government Department