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Security Penetration Testing: Why, When, and How?

Proactive cybersecurity protections are critical to overall product success due to increasing risk, combined with consumer and enterprise awareness of cyber practices and their impact. River Loop Security works with a wide variety of organizations to secure their products; as a result we have seen the effectiveness proactive security has on their success. One tool that we often draw upon is penetration testing (‘pentest’ for short), or the act of simulating a scenario in which a malicious actor is attempting to penetrate a device or system. From this scenario, we are able to emulate the attacker mindset and see things that are often missed during regular code review or quality assurance, resulting in valuable feedback that can be used to further secure a system. In this post we will be discussing some key advantages penetration tests provide, the differences in testing during various stages of the product lifecycle, along with some of our methodology on how we work with teams to provide the most value during a penetration test.

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The real costs of being reactive – and a way forward

My team talks a lot about “proactive security” – the concept of baking cybersecurity measures into architecture and design as opposed to responding to vulnerabilities and breaches when they occur. However, I lacked a quantitative answer when recently asked: “how do you convince businesses to start being proactive?”

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Helping Embedded Developers Code More Securely: banned.h and strsafe

Windows developers may be familiar with “banned.h” or “strsafe” libraries. Introducing safe libraries to development is nothing new, as was covered in the 2007 presentation on SDL for Windows Vista (slide 7). While basic, these basic libraries have been shown to provide significant value - as discussed later in the deck, 41% of bugs that Microsoft removed in Vista early on were due to removal of ‘banned’ API function calls.

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