Engineering
Most breaches in systems of this size come from credentials and dependencies rather than exotic attacks. Access control, secret handling and update discipline cover the majority of realistic risk.
Context
Security failures are usually operational rather than clever, which means they are preventable by process rather than by expertise nobody has.
Choices
Every choice below has a reason attached. A stack without reasons is a logo wall.
The questions we work through before recommending anything in this area.
Recommending something everywhere is the same as having no opinion.
Where we apply it
No. These are engineering practices applied to what we build. Where a formal certification or penetration test is required, that is specialist work commissioned separately, and we would say so rather than imply coverage we do not have.
Credentials with broader permissions than needed, and dependencies that have not been updated. Neither is sophisticated, and together they account for a large share of practical risk.
Most breaches in systems of this size come from credentials and dependencies rather than exotic attacks. Access control, secret handling and update discipline cover the majority of realistic risk.
Security failures are usually operational rather than clever, which means they are preventable by process rather than by expertise nobody has.
As a replacement for a specialist assessment where the risk profile genuinely warrants one; As a compliance claim: these are engineering practices, not a certification; and As a reason to delay delivery indefinitely; security added continuously beats security deferred
What the blast radius of one compromised credential is today; Whether anyone can list the third-party dependencies in production; and How access is revoked when someone leaves
Every account and integration gets the narrowest permissions that let it work. It costs a little setup time and limits how far a single compromised credential reaches.
Credentials in environment configuration or a managed secret store, never in code. A secret committed once is in the history permanently, whoever deletes it later.
Connected
Bring the existing system and the constraints around it. We will tell you where this fits, where it would be the wrong tool, and what we would leave exactly as it is.
