Penetration testing helps to improve your organisation’s DevOps infrastructure by identifying weaknesses in your software delivery process. When security experts test your systems, they uncover issues that could put your business at risk – and their findings become a roadmap for strengthening your infrastructure.
The testing team will generate detailed reports highlighting all of the vulnerabilities they have identified. This document will guide infrastructure improvements, promoting proactive security measures that protect sensitive data and prevent future incidents.
But what happens after the pentest is complete and you’ve received the findings? How can those results actually improve your day-to-day operations?
In this blog, we’ll explore the common security gaps that pentests typically find in development environments, explain why addressing these findings is crucial for your business, and share practical steps you can take to integrate better security into your development process.
Understanding Penetration Test Results in DevOps Context
The first step to effectively translating penetration test results into actionable next steps is to understand what the findings actually mean for your DevOps teams.
While vulnerabilities can vary broadly, there are a few common vulnerabilities you are likely to encounter that directly interplay with your CI/CD pipeline. Let’s explore.
Types of Vulnerabilities Commonly Found
- Code injection flaws in CI/CD pipelines: Where malicious code is inserted, potentially compromising the entire software delivery process and causing security issues.
- Misconfigurations in containerised environments: Misconfigurations can expose sensitive information and create entry points for attackers to exploit and gain unauthorised access.
- Exposed secrets and credentials: API keys or passwords, if leaked, can lead to data breaches and loss of customer trust.
- Insecure API endpoints and microservices: These often lack proper authentication or validation, making them vulnerable to attacks such as lateral movement and data exfiltration.
Risk Assessment and Prioritisation
It can feel overwhelming to suddenly face a multitude of issues flagged within your DevOps infrastructure, especially given the high stakes involved in the event of a breach. However, you can simplify and streamline this process by first assessing the risk level of each finding, then systematically resolving them from critical to low impact through manageable, measurable steps.
Here are some key points to consider when evaluating your results (many pentest providers also include these insights in their findings reports).
- CVSS scoring for DevOps-specific vulnerabilities: a CVSS score can help your business to organise threats based on criticality, with a higher CVSS score representing a more critical and imminent threat.
- Business impact analysis on deployment cycles: Evaluating how security vulnerabilities affect deployment speed, system stability, and overall operational efficiency within DevOps workflows can help you determine which remediations to prioritise to minimise disruption to your CI/CD pipeline.
- Classification of critical vs non-critical findings: By determining which identified vulnerabilities are critical versus non-critical, you can prioritise remediating critical threats and effectively minimise the risk window.
Developing Remediation Strategies from Pentest Findings
Of course, simply identifying the criticality of potential vulnerabilities flagged by your pentest is only the first step: awareness is great, but what’s important is how you actually remediate them. By blending short-term tactical fixes with a vision for long-term strategic improvements, you can both patch existing issues and proactively minimise the risk of future security incidents.
What is a Short-term Tactical Fix?
Short-term tactical fixes refer to quick and actionable steps that can be taken as soon as a vulnerability is identified. Usually, short-term fixes are most appropriate for low-level, common vulnerabilities. They support immediate risk reduction and speed up the process of securing your network. Here are some recommended short-term tactical fixes:
- Immediate vulnerability patching procedures: Apply critical patches within 24-48 hours, prioritising internet-facing systems and those handling sensitive data
- Emergency deployment protocols: Activate incident response teams with clear communication channels and expedited change management processes
- Temporary security controls and workarounds: Implement network segmentation or firewall rules to isolate vulnerable or affected systems until permanent fixes are deployed
What is a Long-Term Strategic Improvement?
A long-term strategic improvement, unlike short-term tactical actions, involves a comprehensive examination of the root causes of high-level vulnerabilities. It relies on forensic analysis and insights gained from pentesting to develop a strategic roadmap aimed at enhancing your business’s overall security posture.
This larger roadmap will consist of key steps, tools, and threat intelligence, drawing on lessons learned from your pentest to strengthen your security going forward. Here are some of the key things that might make their way into your long-term strategic improvement:
- Infrastructure redesign considerations: Evaluate current network and system architectures to identify weaknesses, then plan and implement structural changes that enhance security, scalability, and resilience against evolving threats.
- Security architecture enhancements: Strengthen security frameworks by incorporating advanced technologies, enforcing strict access controls, and embedding security principles into every layer of the infrastructure to reduce attack surfaces.
- Tool and technology upgrades: Assess and adopt modern security tools and technologies that offer improved detection, response capabilities, automation, and integration to keep pace with emerging cyber threats and compliance requirements.
Continuous Integration and Security: The Critical Interplay
For DevOps, a lot of post-pentest remediation work will fall on securing the CI/CD pipeline. Balancing rapidity with robust security has always been a tightrope walk when it comes to the development cycle, and so the build environment must be as fortified as possible. Ensure you have covered these essential areas in your software development lifecycle:
Securing the CI/CD Pipeline
Protecting the source code repository is vital for DevOps teams to prevent unauthorised access and keep code safe. Hardening the build environment reduces risks during code compilation, while vulnerability scanning and validating artefacts ensure no vulnerable components reach production. Deployment approval workflows add a layer of control, stopping unverified code from being released.
Automated Security Testing Integration
Automated security testing helps catch issues early and often. Static Application Security Testing (SAST) checks code for vulnerabilities before it’s built. Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) tests running apps for security flaws. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scanning finds misconfigurations in automated setups, keeping environments secure.
Shift-Left Security Practices
Shift-left security puts developers in charge of early protection. Through an employee training programme, you can raise security awareness and build effective incident response procedures. Pre-commit hooks stop insecure code before it’s added by automatically checking for vulnerabilities and enforcing coding standards at the earliest stage of development. Threat modelling during sprint planning can also help your team to spot risks early and address vulnerabilities before they become higher risk.
How Can I Improve Event Management and Production Environment Security?
Monitoring and Alerting Enhancements
After a pentest reveals attacker tactics, enhancing monitoring and alerting is crucial. It exposes blind spots where attacks may go unnoticed. DevOps teams should improve event correlation, real-time threat detection, and integrate systems via SIEM and SOAR platforms.
Production Environment Hardening
Hardening your production environment against threats is also an essential component of a long-term strategy to improve DevOps event management and production environment security.
- Network segmentation can help separate critical systems using protective barriers to reduce potential attack points.
- Strong access controls ensure only authorised users can reach sensitive areas through proper permissions and authentication.
- Good secrets management can keep passwords and credentials safely stored, regularly updated, and properly organised.
These combined strategies provide robust protection, helping create stable DevOps environments that can handle security challenges while maintaining smooth daily operations. These practices also mean that, in the event of a breach, the incident timeline is much more trackable than scattered and unorganised security processes, meaning the threat can be identified and isolated much faster.
Turning Findings into Action: Implementing and Improving Security Measures
With all the relevant information and collected data from the penetration test, it’s time to translate these findings into actionable steps. By conducting root cause analysis, operations teams can now use these valuable insights to determine the most effective technology and tools to enable continuous improvement and minimise the risk of real-world breaches occurring.
Through a review of technology and tool stacks, as well as a thorough refresh of human security policies and controls, you can reap the benefits from your post-test findings and secure your CI/CD pipeline. Here are some of our suggestions for transforming findings into action:
Technology and Tool Implementation Top Tips
- Create a security tool integration roadmap: Rather than overwhelming your environment with numerous security tools, strategically map tools across pipeline stages and set baseline security gates. Review configurations, prioritise critical vulnerabilities for remediation, and implement continuous monitoring to avoid future gaps.
- Explore automation capabilities for security processes: With threats more continuous and complex than ever before, manual security controls alone cannot effectively provide 360-degree surveillance of your environment’s security posture.
- Fortunately, many highly effective automated security tools- such as OnSecurity’s Threat Intelligence and Web Scanning – are available to provide a continuous assessment of your posture, and alert you instantly to exposed credentials or potential breaches. Choose security tools that blend automated intelligence with human expertise for the most robust around-the-clock security evaluation.
- Review container and Kubernetes security platforms: After a pentest, DevOps teams should review container and Kubernetes security platforms because these environments create unique vulnerabilities. Pentests often expose gaps in runtime protection, image scanning, network segmentation, and access controls. Container platforms introduce specific risks like configuration drift, privilege escalation, and lateral movement that standard security tools can’t adequately address, requiring specialised solutions.
Achieve CI/CD security with OnSecurity’s penetration testing and real-time insights
Now you know everything you need to know about post-pentest remediation and its implications on your business’s DevOps infrastructure, why not take a proactive stance and fortify your continuous integration pipeline with OnSecurity’s platform-based penetration testing services?
Receive real-time reports on your security posture and prevent future attacks with our developer-friendly pentest platform, designed with ease-of-use and development cycles in mind. Get your free quote today.
