Securing the Modern Stack: A VAPT Playbook for Web, Mobile, and Cloud
Securing the Modern Stack: A VAPT Playbook for Web, Mobile, and Cloud
Breaches rarely start cinematic; they start mundane—an unpatched library, a leaky S3 bucket, a debug endpoint left alive. A tight Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing (VAPT) program treats your stack like an attacker would: enumerate, exploit, validate, and fix on a clock.
Common exploit paths
- Web: IDOR on REST endpoints, SSRF via image fetchers, deserialization in legacy APIs, XSS from third-party widgets, weak JWT validation (none/HS256 confusions).
- Mobile: Insecure local storage (SQLite/Keychain), MITM due to lax TLS pinning, exported Android components, leaked secrets in APK/IPA, weak root/jailbreak detection.
- Cloud: Public buckets, permissive IAM (“*” in policies), over-broad security groups, ghost workloads without patch SLAs, stale access keys.
Playbook & timelines
- Scoping (Days 0–2): Asset inventory, threat modeling by data class, test windows agreed with DevOps.
- Assessment (Days 3–10): Automated + manual testing; abuse flows (password reset, checkout, invite).
- Validation (Days 11–12): Proof-of-exploit with minimal blast radius; reproduce steps logged.
- Remediation (Days 13–28):
- Critical (24–72h): authn/z flaws, RCE, data exfil paths.
- High (≤7d): SSRF/XSS/IDOR without widespread PII access.
- Medium (≤14d): clickjacking, headers, rate limits.
- Low (≤28d): info leaks, verbose errors.
- Hardening & drift control (Monthly): SBOM tracking, patch cadences, IaC policy checks (OPA), secret scanning, canary tokens, and continuous attack surface monitoring.
Measure success with MTTR per severity, exploit reoccurrence, and time-to-patch. Security isn’t a gate—it’s a habit with a stopwatch.
