Testing
Application Security
Security review for the software your team builds and ships.
If your organisation builds software — a customer-facing product, an internal platform, an API others depend on — application security is a different discipline from network or infrastructure security. It concerns the code your team writes and the dependencies it pulls in.
What application security work covers
Several distinct activities sit under this heading and they are not interchangeable. Secure code review is manual examination of source code for flaws — authentication and authorisation logic, input handling, business logic that can be abused, cryptographic mistakes. It finds things no automated tool will. Application penetration testing exercises the running application from the outside, typically covering the OWASP Top 10 categories plus business-logic testing specific to what your application does. Dependency and supply chain review examines third-party libraries for known vulnerabilities and licence exposure — increasingly the source of real incidents. Secure development guidance addresses process rather than a point-in-time finding: threat modelling, pipeline integration, and giving developers feedback early enough that fixes are cheap.
Who needs it
- Product teams shipping software to customers, particularly where it handles personal or financial data
- Companies whose customers ask for evidence of application security testing
- Teams that have grown a codebase quickly without a security review
- Organisations relying on outsourced development who want independent verification
What you get
The right activity for the question
Code review, application testing, and dependency analysis answer different questions. We help identify which one your situation actually calls for.
Stack-relevant matching
Specialists matched to your language and framework. Reviewing a Rails application and reviewing a Go microservice estate are different skills.
Output your developers can act on
Proposals specify whether findings include remediation guidance at the code level and whether a retest is included.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between SAST, DAST, and a penetration test?
SAST analyses source code statically and runs in your pipeline; it is fast and catches common patterns but produces false positives. DAST tests the running application automatically. A penetration test is manual work by a person who understands your application's business logic — it finds the flaws that are specific to what your application does, which tools cannot infer. Use scanning continuously and testing periodically.
Do we need a code review if we already have a penetration test?
They surface different things. A penetration test sees the application as an attacker does, from outside. A code review sees logic that may not be reachable in the tested environment — flaws in error paths, in administrative functions, or in code not yet exposed. High-risk applications benefit from both; for many teams, testing first and adding review later is a reasonable sequence.
How do we handle third-party library vulnerabilities?
Automated dependency scanning in your CI pipeline catches known vulnerabilities in published libraries and should be running continuously — it is cheap and effective. The judgement call is triage: deciding which flagged vulnerabilities are actually reachable in your usage and which are noise. That part benefits from experienced input.
Can testing be integrated into our development process?
Yes, and it costs less than periodic testing alone. Common approaches include pipeline-integrated scanning, threat modelling at design stage, and developer training focused on the flaw classes that recur in your codebase. Finding a flaw during design is dramatically cheaper than finding it after release.