Day 3

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Key Activities

• Measure current vulnerability posture.
• Initiate vulnerability testing.
• Triage vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability Assessments

To determine what sort of vulnerability assessment is most appropriate, consider your current status and resources:

Scenario	Appropriate Assessments
Resources and support for immediate unlimited continuous assessments	Perform assessments across all discovered assets
Limited resources or appetite for unlimited continuous assessments	At a minimum frequency of testing should keep or exceed rate of change in asset
Application currently exist in production environment:	Begin dynamic* assessments for these existing applications
Source Code of your application(s) is available on the internet (Freely available, stolen, etc.)	Begin Static Analysis assessments
Business is subject to compliance mandate requiring Static Analysis	Begin Static Analysis assessments
New development project of an application Begin Static Analysis assessments	Dynamic assessments completed and application security program in continuous improvement cycle
Begin Static Analysis assessments	Begin Dynamic Analysis in QA/Staging

Other scenarios to consider Static Analysis as the first assessment type or in parallel with Dynamic Analysis:

• High developer attrition rate
• Known internal bad actors
• Disgruntled current or former employee with access to source code
• Outsourced code

Static Analysis

Static Code Analysis (also known as Source Code Analysis or Static Application Security Testing (SAST)) is usually performed as part of a Code Review (also known as white-box testing) and is carried out at the Implementation phase of a Security Development Lifecycle (SDL). Static Code Analysis commonly refers to the running of Static Code Analysis tools that attempt to highlight possible vulnerabilities within ‘static’ (non-running) source code by using techniques such as Taint Analysis and Data Flow Analysis.

Dynamic Analysis

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), also referred to as “black-box” testing, identifies vulnerabilities in running web applications – testing of the application from the outside in.

Vulnerability Delivery

To deliver valuable vulnerability information to your business, you must:

• Document vulnerability delegation and vulnerability lifecycle process
• Feed issues into existing tracking systems where possible to preserve the existing workflow
• Triage vulnerabilities prior to feeding them into your defect management systems
• Ensure only true positives are fed to development teams
• Track re-testing of vulnerabilities via new incident/ticket or update existing incident/ticket.
• Define which issues are important to the business
• Create a baseline of the issues that are important to the business
• Align vulnerability remediation strategy with loss exposure versus resources available to fix
• Create a knowledge base of common issues and their solutions
• Dedicate resource(s) to developer interactions, including educating developers on security topics
• Publish aggregate metrics internally
• Match or outpace release cycles in detecting and responding to vulnerabilities.

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