The Schellman Blog

Penetration testing and red team assessments are often conflated or confused—though they’re both advantageous cybersecurity solutions, there are distinct differences between them that any organization considering either should know. Just to be clear, a penetration test is not a red team assessment.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of security standards designed to protect cardholder data. One of the key (and almost always applicable) requirements of PCI DSS is that organizations must perform internal and external penetration testing for the entire scoped environment—this not only applies to systems that store, process, or transmit cardholder data, but also those that can impact the security of cardholder data.

Red teaming is a proactive approach to cybersecurity, where a group of ethical hackers simulates real-world attacks on an organization's systems to identify vulnerabilities and test its defenses. This process helps organizations improve their security posture by revealing weaknesses before malicious actors can exploit them.

As cybersecurity practices go, you have a lot of options, with penetration testing being just one of them. However, a penetration test has more value than many may initially recognize—in addition to how they serve your compliance initiatives.

Some might say a good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.

The world of information security is ever-evolving as further innovation and development continue to drive the market forward. Web applications are no exception, but as they grow more complex with the addition of new features and supporting technology, so do their attack surfaces. Sometimes, it can feel like the latest risk to your web application is seemingly around the corner, and really, that might be true—it’s become more important than ever to maintain a good security posture.

There’s a Latin proverb that says, “if the wind will not serve, take to the oars.” If you’ve ever hunted for a (new) job, you likely can relate. Of course, every workplace has its idiosyncrasies, but you need to find the “wind” that serves you best.

Once again, we need to talk about Burp. At Schellman, we’ve talked about this tool before—on our penetration testing team, we use it a lot and it serves us well, including in our work with mobile applications. But that doesn’t mean there still aren’t situations where extra effort is required in order to get the job done. Our fellow pen testers all know that things evolve so quickly in our field that sometimes we must improvise a new technique to properly solve to the problems we run into. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but one such issue that we are seeing crop up more and more during mobile penetration tests has to do with intercepting traffic from an application. Each time we watch some of that traffic escape our data flow, we’ve found each instance difficult and puzzling, because it’s not a static problem—when it comes to intercepting traffic from mobile applications, the issues can range from common to complex. One of those trickier ones to troubleshoot as a tester is when you can see most of the general web traffic from the mobile device being tested as it goes to Burp, but you also see that none, or very little, of the traffic from the actual mobile app under test follows. When that happens, you probably also note that there are no TLS errors for the domain in scope in the Event log from the Burp dashboard, and that, at the same time, the app seems to be working well, performing requests and receiving data as expected—there’s no other problem, it’s just that some of that traffic has decided to shoot off to the Great Unknown rather than where you know it should be. Does that sound familiar? If you’ve been frustrated by this same problem before, welcome to the club. This article will seek to understand why this even occurs in the first place before laying out a potential solution we worked up to curb any traffic trying to escape your proxy. Read on, and next time said traffic tries to get away from you, you’ll be ready.