Build And Configuration Reviews
Identify misconfiguration risks before they widen your attack surface. Without a verified baseline, assets enter production exposed, and the gap grows with every unreviewed deployment. Cyphere’s secure configuration reviews benchmark infrastructure against CIS standards, surfacing deviations that directly increase breach risk.
Establish security baselines across servers, endpoints, and cloud assets. Cyphere’s configuration assessments reduce configuration drift, limit privilege exposure, and support compliance throughout the asset lifecycle.
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What is a Build and Configuration review?
A build and configuration review, also known as a secure configuration hardening review, involves reviewing the underlying Operating System and related components such as firmware, removable media interfaces in line with good security practices.
At times, customers request such reviews in comparison with CIS, NIST or internal guidelines. This is a white box pen test exercise performed to fully deliver knowledge of the system infrastructure.
A server with a lack of hardening or misconfiguration issues could provide a point on an easy route in developing network compromise or unauthorised access to sensitive details.
A weakly configured infrastructure may not only add vulnerabilities to the network, but a rootkit or a backdoor configured into the machine may go undetected for months.
This review helps to fill and discuss identifying weaknesses in a configuration to help you remediate issues in line with best practices.
Why do you need security hardening ?
A proactive security strategy defines controls in layered fashion. It is always better to embed security mindset early in the asset lifecycle. There is no cheaper, effective and better ROI than secure hardening reviews. Regular security hardening assessments ensure weak security settings, hardening issues and data protection weaknesses are identified early.
Before any new builds o network configurations are rolled into the production environment, it is important to release secure builds and provide for network configuration review or security validation to keep the attack surface to a minimum.
Having a configuration security review based benchmarking process in place ensures that vulnerabilities are reduced to minimum at the start of the asset lifecycle. Should your requirements mean looking around entire estate, read more about our full range of penetration testing services.
Benefits of Secure Configuration Review
- Protect your assets early in the asset lifecycle
- Follow a proactive approach to cyber security best practice
- Demonstrate security by design mindset to your business and supply chain
- Service quality underpins everything we do
- One time reviews improve your internal build methodology
- PCI DSS, ISO 27001, GDPR Compliance support
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Harman was great, really knowledgeable
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"Highly recommend Cyphere for pen testing. The recommendations in the report were comprehensive and communicated so that technical and non-technical members of the team could follow them."
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"Cyphere were great in both carrying out our penetration testing and taking us through the results and remediation steps. We would gladly use them for future projects.
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"We had penetration tests service for PCI DSS compliance program from the Cyphere! Very professional, efficient communication, great findings that improved our system security posture! Highly recommended!
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"Harman and the team at Cyphere truly are experts in their field and provide an outstanding service! Always going above and beyond to exceed customer expectations.
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I’ve worked with Cyphere on a number of penetration tests in addition to some cyber essentials support and certification! I’ve found them to be highly skilled and professional.
Skilled Team
I’ve worked with Cyphere on a number of penetration tests in addition to some cyber essentials support and certification! I’ve found them to be highly skilled and professional.
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Cyphere undertook pen testing for us recently. The process was very smooth, and the team were flexible in working around our constraints. The report was clear, actionable and perceptive.
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Cyphere has been outstanding partner to our agency. I've tried many in the past but they have been extremely meticulous in getting our systems secured.
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Cyphere has been an excellent partner and helped us achieve our goals with a great level of expertise, communication and helpfulness making the whole process easy to understand and complete.
High Standards
Harman and his team were excellent throughout, they understood and completed the tasks (external penetration test) within tight deadlines to a high standard.
Communicative & Responsive Team
I had an amazing experience working with Cyphere! Their communication was top-notch, making the entire process smooth and efficient. I found their team to be incredibly responsive and attentive to my needs.
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Worked with team at Cyphere for a cyber security assessment, gap analysis etc. The team has delivered a very professional, efficient service at all stages of the process to date.
What is a build review?
Build review is the process of examining a software build to ensure that it meets quality standards. The purpose of build review is to catch any errors or problems with the build before it’s released. This can help prevent issues from occurring in production and can save time and money by catching problems early on.
Build and Configuration Reviews Methodology
A secure review involves assessing the operating systems, databases, devices or network equipment. It involves configuration and analysis phase followed by reporting as per the agreed form. Unlike penetration testing that involves security review from the surface, based on the running services, build review and configuration reviews explore the specific host’s configuration for instance, mobile devices, network devices, firewall configuration or any other assets.
Our team is committed to ensuring, that as our customer, you receive the utmost value out of our team consultancy services and look forward to developing a long-lasting business company relationship with you. Our secure configuration reviews project are aligned with the best practice in the world in each area including the following secure hardening standards:
- Baseline standards as per the customer organization
- CIS benchmarks with hardening standards published for most vendors
- NIST standards
- Or commenced as part of ISO 27001 , PCI DSS projects.
Why build reviews are important?
The importance of a build review can’t be overstated. By conducting a regular build review, you can ensure that your software builds are of high quality and meet your standards. This can help prevent problems from occurring in production, which can save time and money. In addition, build reviews provide an opportunity for team members to collaborate and share knowledge.
- the codebase
- the build process
- the test suite
- the release process
- Knowledge of vulnerabilities
- Shorten potential downtimes
- Uncover potential cyberthreats
- Reduce mistakes on future deployments
- Ensure proper configurations
- Improved security posture
Build and configuration review test cases
Security vulnerabilities across networking, security, telecommunications & other internal equipment, OS and endpoint vulnerabilities.
Effective patch management plays critical role in closing window of opportunity for attackers, thats between the vulnerability disclosure and patch release.
Group Policy allows administrators to define security policies for users and the servers within the network. These policies are administered from a central location exclusively to the Windows operating system. The policy settings generally, among other things, enforce password settings, external media access, network-level access, patching schedule and application restrictions.
The best practices based group policy would ensure a safer network for an organisation and minimise the attack window for a threat actor to gain unauthorised access.
Logging and monitoring controls are reviewed to identify flaws in event collection, analysis and threat identification.
Full disk encryption is a cryptographic method that applies encryption to the entire hard drive including data, files and software programs. In an adverse case, if a device/server is stolen or unauthorised physical access is achieved, this could be disastrous for a company. A threat actor would gain access to sensitive information such as personably identifiable information (PII) or proprietary information stored on this device due to a lack of disk encryption.
Your network devices or servers BIOS or UEFI Firmware offers the ability to set lower-level passwords. These passwords would restrict people from booting the server, booting from removable devices, and changing BIOS or UEFI settings without administrators permission.
The nature of security vulnerabilities and threats is one of constant evolution; growing in sophistication and changing in order to exploit new vulnerabilities and evade detection.
This is why you need to perform regular secure configuration reviews and security assessments to protect your network devices, device configuration, firewall configuration, security systems and mobile devices.
Authentication is a fundamental component of ensuring cyber security controls for most of the assets.
Based on our methodology and scope of the job, we perform two types of password reviews which include password policy reviews and a password cracking exercise followed by statistical analysis to find out the complexity & character patterns in use.
A vast majority of cyber attacks take advantage of known software and hardware vulnerabilities. Unpatched software including Operating System (OS) and third-party applications can attract malicious code to the vulnerable servers. Software patching can act as a defensive armour that repels malicious attacks and protects your organisation against multiple exploits. This finding is tested during penetration testing and build reviews.
Build Reviews - Server and laptop security configuration
- Operating Systems security review
- Account Lockout Policy
- Privilege Management
- Audit Policy
- User password policy
- Patch Management
- Logging and Monitoring
- Secondary services and configurations
- Insecure Service / File System Permissions
- Network security policies
- Network and Host firewall restrictions
- Software Restriction and Application Control Policies
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