Strategy and Solutions
A multinational retailer operating thousands of stores and a high-volume e-commerce platform engaged Zymr to harden its hybrid network before peak holiday sales. The environment spanned on-prem data centers, public cloud workloads, regional store networks, and third-party logistics integrations. With millions of daily transactions and globally distributed customer data, a single breach could cause outsized financial and reputational harm.
Leadership sought comprehensive visibility into vulnerabilities, practical guidance to remediate misconfigurations at scale, and assurance that heightened seasonal traffic would not coincide with elevated security risk.
In short, the retailer asked for risk discovery, prioritization, and measurable hardening—without disrupting revenue-critical systems or release calendars.
The assessment started with a sprawling estate and accumulating technical debt.
Multiple firewall vendors, legacy VPN concentrators, and regional policies had diverged. Some store subnets were flatly routable to corporate apps. TLS configurations varied, leaving older ciphers and weak DH parameters exposed on certain edges.
Initial scans flagged 300+ vulnerabilities: unpatched web servers, default SNMP communities, exposed management interfaces, and stale DNS records. Teams lacked a single, business-aligned prioritization method to tackle the backlog.
The public-facing stack (WAF, CDN, origin clusters) handled card payments and PII. The risk of lateral movement from a compromised web node to data stores was non-trivial due to inconsistent segmentation.
Holiday campaigns, code freezes, and inventory cutoffs created immovable dates. Security work had to be sequenced to avoid collisions with peak operations.
Net-net, the company needed fast clarity on what to fix first, disciplined execution across teams, and confirmation that exploitable paths were closed before traffic surged.
Zymr provided assurance exactly when it mattered most. By converting a sprawling vulnerability list into a disciplined remediation and validation program, the client protected peak-season revenue and reinforced brand trust. Security became a predictable part of operations—measured, scheduled, and aligned to business risk.
In effect, the retailer gained both immediate protection and a durable operating model for ongoing network security.
The retailer navigated its highest-risk window with a materially reduced exposure profile and uninterrupted revenue operations.
The organization left the peak season with not only fewer vulnerabilities but also stronger muscles for sustaining security at scale.
Zymr delivered an end-to-end hardening program: discovery, exploitation testing, remediation orchestration, and monitoring enablement.
We built a consolidated asset and exposure map across cloud and data center perimeters, store networks, and partner links. Attack surface enumeration identified externally reachable services, management ports, and third-party callbacks. We correlated findings with business criticality (payment flows, customer data, logistics) to anchor prioritization.
We ranked issues by exploitability and blast radius. Examples: closing admin interfaces exposed to the internet; enforcing TLS 1.3 and disabling weak ciphers; segmenting e-commerce origins from analytics clusters; tightening VPN profiles to least privilege. A war-room cadence assigned owners, SLAs, and change windows per region.
We executed controlled exploits to validate risks: credential reuse paths from kiosk endpoints, SSRF pivots through legacy integration proxies, and misconfigured jump hosts. Proofs of concept were shared privately with fix steps and compensating controls where upgrades would take longer.
Firewall rule sets were normalized; IDS/IPS signatures updated; WAF policies tuned to block real attack patterns seen in pen tests; load balancers reconfigured to enforce header sanitation. A golden configuration baseline was authored and pushed via automation to minimize drift.
After remediation sprints, we re-tested high-risk paths. We recommended SIEM integration across regions and built priority alert rules (e.g., suspicious east-west traffic, impossible travel authentications, anomalous data exfil). A central SOC view gave leadership cross-regional situational awareness.
Together, these measures shrank the attack surface, broke lateral movement routes, and established monitoring that could detect and contain threats during the busiest period of the year.
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