SecureNet — Independent Security Assurance Before a Funding Round

SecureNet was preparing for a Series B funding round. Their annual compliance review had surfaced concerning gaps in the vulnerability posture of their customer-facing banking platform, and the board wanted independent assurance before sitting in front of investors. The catch: they needed it done in 30 days, without disrupting production.

We scoped the engagement to maximize meaningful coverage in the available window: black-box testing simulating an external attacker, authenticated testing across three role tiers to surface privilege-escalation paths, and a focused API security review of the highest-risk endpoints. Production was off-limits — we mirrored the entire stack to a staging environment matched to production within 48 hours.

Two engineers ran in parallel for two weeks. Automated scanning ran nightly with Burp Suite and OWASP ZAP, while manual review focused on the application logic that scanners can't see — multi-step workflows, business-rule edge cases, and authentication chains. Every finding was reproduced from scratch and rated using CVSS 3.1, then walked through with SecureNet's engineering team in three live debrief sessions.

All critical and high findings were re-tested after remediation before sign-off. The final report was delivered as both an executive PDF and a tracked findings spreadsheet for the dev team.