4 ms·

I'm a professional red teamer at a FAANG company, for reference. There are plenty of times where I find several low severity vulnerabilities, none of which are

I'm a professional red teamer at a FAANG company, for reference. There are plenty of times where I find several low severity vulnerabilities, none of which are exploitable alone, but which can be chained together to produce a functional exploit with real impact. There's no guarantee any of your testers will find every issue, and there's no guarantee that a seemingly innocuous finding can't have a greater impact than might readily be apparent. That said, there are a ton of charlatans in security exactly like you describe - folks who can't read code (let alone write it) who just know how to click "scan" on their GUI tools and export the report to a PDF. A lot orgs have a QA-level team running those automated scans, which get passed on to a penetration testing team, who have more experience, but a limited time window for testing, and then finally on to red teams, who, along with some appsec / product security folks who are embedded directly on product teams, tend to have the most expertise, and the most time to really dive deeply into a service or application. Also, keep in mind that those gawking over this probably aren't security folks, and the competent security folks here may not be gawking at the file itself (or others) - just taking part in the discussion.

justinjlynn 4y ago
> There are plenty of times where I find several low severity vulnerabilities, none of which are exploitable alone, but which can be chained together to produce a functional exploit with real impact. There's no guarantee any of your testers will find every issue, and there's no guarantee that a seemingly innocuous finding can't have a greater impact than might readily be apparent Absolutely this. Security often has a different perspective as to how systems may be exploited together to create a systemic issue where none exists independently. Of course, this is often also where security fails in communicating exactly why these low severity issues must be corrected and facilitating an engineering discussion as to how the attack chain can be effectively disrupted and detective controls implemented elsewhere in the chain such that attempts to exploit are detected. In short, the failure isn't in finding the threat but in dictating solutions without getting everyone involved in engineering the interaction in the room, so to speak. I would be ideal to have security engineering as an embedded function representing red and blue team findings as systems requirements and acting as a single point contact in regards to security issues such that mutual trust and respect may be developed.

justinjlynn 4y ago

> There are plenty of times where I find several low severity vulnerabilities, none of which are exploitable alone, but which can be chained together to produce a functional exploit with real impact. There's no guarantee any of your testers will find every issue, and there's no guarantee that a seemingly innocuous finding can't have a greater impact than might readily be apparent Absolutely this. Security often has a different perspective as to how systems may be exploited together to create a systemic issue where none exists independently. Of course, this is often also where security fails in communicating exactly why these low severity issues must be corrected and facilitating an engineering discussion as to how the attack chain can be effectively disrupted and detective controls implemented elsewhere in the chain such that attempts to exploit are detected. In short, the failure isn't in finding the threat but in dictating solutions without getting everyone involved in engineering the interaction in the room, so to speak. I would be ideal to have security engineering as an embedded function representing red and blue team findings as systems requirements and acting as a single point contact in regards to security issues such that mutual trust and respect may be developed.