Zymr executed a blended engagement, combining external black-box testing, internal white-box testing, and controlled social-engineering exercises, followed by prioritized remediation and validation.

1. Recon & exploitation (external)

• Performed automated reconnaissance and manual probing of public endpoints.
  
• Discovered an authentication flaw where session tokens were not invalidated after privilege elevation and could be replayed from another IP when combined with a predictable token-refresh vector.
  
• Demonstrated an exploit path: credential stuffing → session token capture (via exposed token storage in a staging S3 bucket) → session reuse to perform account actions.
  
  

2. Internal lateral-movement testing

• With staging access, Zymr simulated a compromised DMZ host and executed pivot techniques to test lateral movement.
  
• Identified several administrative accounts reused across tiers and unsegmented management interfaces that allowed access escalation to internal services.
  
• Found two internal servers missing recent patches that would have enabled privilege escalation using known public exploits.
  
  

3. Social engineering assessment

• Conducted vishing and phishing simulations across corporate staff and branch employees.
  
• Results showed high susceptibility: ~70% clicked simulated phishing links and ~25% disclosed sensitive information under pretexted phone calls. (Controlled, ethically run; no real credentials were harvested.)
  
• Documented common behavioral patterns and key organizational blind spots.
  
  

4. Remediation roadmap & implementation
Zymr delivered a prioritized remediation plan focused on immediate risk reduction and medium-term resilience:

• MFA & adaptive auth: Enforced MFA for all member-facing and administrative logins and integrated device- and risk-based adaptive checks for high-value transactions.
  
• Token hygiene: Rotated and revoked all long-lived tokens, replaced static credentials with ephemeral IAM roles, and moved secrets to a managed vault with automated rotation.
  
• Microsegmentation: Implemented network microsegmentation using identity-aware firewalls to block lateral movement from DMZ to internal clusters.
  
• Patch & config management: Automated patching for critical servers and enforced host hardening baselines.
  
• Security telemetry & IR: Consolidated logs into a SIEM, added detection rules for session anomalies and unusual transaction patterns, and updated the incident response plan with runbooks.
  
• Human controls: Rolled out role-specific phishing simulations and a mandatory security training program tied to performance reviews.
  
  

5. Validation & hardening
After remediation, Zymr re-ran exploitation and social tests to validate fixes. Real-time monitoring was tuned to reduce false positives and capture the specific attack patterns observed during the assessment.

The combined testing and remediation approach closed high-impact attack vectors first—authentication, token management, and segmentation—while building sustainable operational controls (patching, telemetry, training) to reduce recurrence.

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