🧠 AI-Powered Attacks on the Rise

From deepfake phishing to automated malware generation, attackers are leveraging AI tools to scale their campaigns. CERT-In warns of growing threats using LLMs for social engineering and code obfuscation.

🔗 Supply Chain Attacks on Indian SaaS and FinTech

As per NASSCOM, over 45% of mid-sized firms in India rely on third-party libraries and tools — often unvetted. In 2024, multiple attacks occurred through compromised CI/CD pipelines and vendor software.

☁️ Cloud-Native Security Becomes Essential

With 70% of Indian enterprises migrating workloads to AWS, GCP, and Azure (source: Nasscom Cloud Survey 2024), misconfigurations and exposed S3 buckets remain top risks.

📱 Mobile App Threats & API Security

India’s app economy is booming — but so are API leaks, hardcoded secrets, and insecure auth flows. Mobile apps will be a hot target, especially those using UPI and digital wallets.

📊 Key Stats to Note:

• 🧨 150% rise in ransomware cases targeting Indian SMEs (CERT-In, 2024)
• 🔓 62% of web apps tested had at least one OWASP Top 10 vulnerability
• 📉 Only 34% of Indian startups conduct regular security audits

✅ What You Can Do:

• Adopt DevSecOps early — shift security left
• Secure your APIs and cloud assets with automated scanning
• Train teams on phishing, mobile app hygiene, and secure coding
• Partner with security experts for VAPT & compliance readiness

Final Thought: India’s digital future depends on building secure systems. Be proactive, not reactive — and stay ahead of cybercriminals in 2025.

📂 Vulnerability 1: Unrestricted File Upload

The portal allowed PDF uploads for student assignments. However, the server failed to validate MIME types and extensions properly. By uploading a .php file disguised as a .pdf, we gained remote shell access via a LFI route.

Worse, uploaded files were placed inside a web-accessible directory with no content-disposition headers — allowing direct execution.

Exploit Path: studentportal.edu/uploads/shell.php

🌐 Vulnerability 2: Misconfigured CORS Policy

The Access-Control-Allow-Origin header echoed back any origin using a wildcard + credentials:

Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
    

This made it possible to craft a malicious cross-origin script on attacker.com that could silently access user sessions from the portal.

🔧 How We Demonstrated the Attack

• Uploaded a proof-of-concept web shell to validate RCE
• Built a malicious JavaScript that stole session cookies via CORS
• Reported it to university IT along with impact severity

🎓 Impact

- 7,000+ student records (grades, contact info) were at risk.
- Stored assignments were accessible and modifiable.
- Admin login sessions could be hijacked remotely via CORS misconfig.

✅ Recommendations We Gave

• Use strict file upload validation (extension + content-type + magic byte check)
• Serve uploads from a non-executable, CDN-style subdomain
• Restrict CORS to known origins and avoid credentials: true with wildcards

Lesson: Even non-commercial platforms like university portals can have production-level vulnerabilities. Secure uploads + CORS = basic hygiene.

1. Broken Access Control: Still topping OWASP charts. Attackers manipulate user-level access to perform unauthorized actions (e.g., admin access).

2. Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF): Gaining popularity in cloud environments. Attackers force a server to make unintended requests — leaking metadata or internal APIs.

3. Cryptographic Failures: Weak or outdated encryption allows data interception. Proper TLS usage and AES-256 standard should be enforced.

4. Insecure Design: Security gaps in app logic, such as missing authorization checks or insecure flows.

5. Security Misconfiguration: Default credentials, open ports, or unpatched services remain a risk. DevSecOps practices can help reduce these.

Pro Tip: Use tools like OWASP ZAP, Burp Suite, and manual testing to regularly assess web applications. Create secure-by-design architecture from the beginning.

During a black-box assessment, our team identified a classic Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) flaw. Anyone could change the customer ID in a request and fetch other users' data.

We responsibly disclosed the issue to the fintech CTO. They were unaware such a critical flaw existed despite using a third-party backend team.

Our security team provided a proof-of-concept (PoC), and worked with their developers to:

• Implement proper authorization checks on all endpoints
• Use UUIDs instead of incremental IDs
• Log abnormal access patterns

Impact Averted: Over 2 lakh records containing PAN, Aadhaar, and contact info were secured before any real exploit occurred. The client avoided heavy GDPR-like penalties and reputational loss.

Burp Suite by PortSwigger is one of the most powerful tools for web application security testing. This guide breaks it down:

✅ Proxy: Intercept and modify live requests between browser and server. Essential for identifying GET/POST flaws.
✅ Repeater: Manually craft and test requests for vulnerabilities like SQLi, XSS, IDOR.
✅ Intruder: Perform brute-force attacks or parameter fuzzing (e.g., to test for OTP bypass).
✅ Extensions: Use Logger++, ActiveScan++, Turbo Intruder to boost capabilities.

Advanced Use Cases:

• Bypassing WAFs using encoding tricks
• Handling tokenized sessions with macros and match-replace
• Using Collaborator for DNS/SSRF payload testing

Pro Tip: Use Burp with Firefox + FoxyProxy and SSL certs installed to unlock full potential.

Many startup founders believe cybercriminals only go after big names. That’s no longer true in 2025.

🚨 Startups are low-hanging fruit: With limited security budgets, unpatched systems, and fast-paced DevOps, most early-stage SaaS platforms have exploitable flaws.

🔍 Why attackers love startups:

• Valuable PII and credentials stored insecurely
• Publicly exposed APIs without authentication
• Developers unaware of OWASP Top 10 threats
• Often no bug bounty or VAPT process in place

💡 Education is key: Awareness among founders, CTOs, and product managers is the first step. We’ve created a free Cybersecurity Checklist to help you secure your startup fast.

Pro Tip: Book a free risk assessment with HVSec to identify gaps before attackers do.

India has become one of the top targets for cybercriminals in Asia. According to CERT-In, cyberattacks on Indian enterprises have surged over 25% in the past year alone.

Here are the top 10 threats affecting Indian businesses in 2025:

• 🎣 Phishing Attacks: Sophisticated fake login portals via email/SMS targeting employees.
• 💰 Ransomware: Locking critical data until a crypto ransom is paid — seen across manufacturing and healthcare sectors.
• 🧠 Credential Stuffing: Attackers using leaked credentials to access banking & SaaS systems.
• ☁️ Cloud Misconfiguration: S3 buckets and exposed GCP storage leaking customer data.
• 🚪 Unpatched Software: Exploits in outdated CMS, plugins, and third-party apps.
• 🔧 Supply Chain Attacks: Exploiting vendors or outsourced development teams.
• 📲 Mobile Malware: Fake apps stealing OTPs and banking info.
• 🔌 IoT Exploits: Weakly secured routers, surveillance cameras, and smart systems.
• 🕵️ Insider Threats: Disgruntled employees leaking sensitive IP or credentials.
• 📉 Weak Incident Response: Lack of proper detection & recovery SOPs causing extended downtimes.

✅ Case Example: In 2024, a Pune-based logistics firm lost ₹1.3 Cr due to a phishing email impersonating a partner. No DMARC policy + no awareness training = disaster.

🚨 Key Insight: It's not about if you’ll be attacked — but when. Prevention, detection, and response must be your priority.

Choosing the wrong VAPT vendor can leave you exposed — or waste your budget with low-quality reports. Before you finalize a vendor, validate these 7 key criteria:

• ✅ Compliance Knowledge: Ensure the team understands ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, or whichever standard applies to your business.
• 📊 Reporting Quality: Ask for a sample report. Look for clarity, risk rating, CVSS scoring, mitigation, and evidence.
• 🛠️ Toolstack: Burp Suite Pro, Nmap, Nessus, Nikto, custom scripts, etc. Manual + automated testing must be combined.
• 🏭 Industry Experience: Choose vendors who have tested companies in your sector (FinTech, SaaS, Healthcare, etc.).
• 🧾 NDA & Confidentiality: Must be willing to sign a strong non-disclosure agreement to protect your data.
• 📅 Timeline & Methodology: Understand how long testing takes and whether they follow OWASP / PTES standards.
• 📞 Post-Audit Support: Will they help retest and verify after patching? Do they offer help on patch prioritization?

Pro Tip: Avoid vendors who only rely on automated tools. A real pentest includes logic testing, chaining vulnerabilities, and business impact analysis.

SSRF vulnerabilities allow an attacker to trick the server into making unintended requests — often leading to data exposure or internal system access. Here's how real-world attackers use it:

🔎 Types of SSRF

• Basic SSRF: You control the URL fetched by the server (e.g., image upload feature).
• Blind SSRF: The response isn't shown, but internal impact occurs — validated via DNS logs (Burp Collaborator).
• SSRF to RCE: Advanced chaining with metadata access (e.g., AWS keys) → leads to remote code execution.

🧪 How to Test (Burp Suite + Manual)

• Inject internal URLs like http://127.0.0.1:80 or http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data
• Use Burp Repeater and Collaborator to confirm out-of-band SSRF
• Try SSRF payloads with URL encoding, DNS rebinding, or header smuggling

🚧 Common SSRF Bypass Tricks

• URL Obfuscation: 127.0.0.1 → 2130706433, 0x7f.0x0.0x0.0x1
• Redirect Chains: First URL redirects to internal address
• Alternate Schemes: gopher://, file://, or dict:// (for advanced chaining)

Real Incident: Capital One’s data breach in 2019 exploited SSRF in AWS WAF to extract metadata and pivot into full S3 access.

Pro Tip: Always validate and whitelist outgoing requests on the backend. SSRF isn’t just an edge case — it's a real, reportable risk.

Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) are the first line of defense — but they’re not bulletproof. Skilled attackers can slip through using creative payload techniques. Here's how:

🔧 Common WAF Bypass Techniques

• Payload Obfuscation: Break signatures by inserting junk data or alternate spellings (e.g., <ScRiPt>, selec/**/t).
• Encoding: URL encode, Base64 encode, Unicode encode dangerous characters to sneak past filters.
• Double Encoding: Encode twice (e.g., %2527 = ') to confuse parsers.

🧪 Advanced Tricks

• HTTP Parameter Pollution: Duplicate keys like user=admin&user=guest to manipulate logic.
• Header Manipulation: Add or spoof headers like X-Original-URL or X-Forwarded-Host.
• HTTP Request Smuggling: Desync frontend and backend with Transfer-Encoding quirks (CL-TE / TE-CL).

🛡️ What You Can Do

• Don't rely solely on WAFs — use secure coding and input validation at backend.
• Use WAF in detection + block mode with custom rules (ModSecurity, AWS WAF, etc.).
• Conduct regular WAF bypass tests in your pentesting cycles.

Pro Tip: Combine tools like Burp Suite, WAFW00F, and custom payloads for effective bypass testing. Always test with and without WAF for full coverage.

During an internal black-box VAPT for a B2B SaaS platform, our team discovered a serious Broken Authentication vulnerability — allowing unauthorized users to gain access to any account.

🕵️‍♂️ Attack Vector

• The app used predictable session tokens (JWTs with Base64 encoded emails)
• There was no server-side session validation or token expiration enforcement
• We brute-forced tokens of admin-level accounts using known email IDs

Once logged in, the attacker could modify billing, access confidential reports, and reset passwords of other users.

🛠️ What We Did

• Delivered a live Proof of Concept (PoC) to the client’s engineering team
• Recommended using signed, encrypted tokens with server-side session mapping
• Suggested rate-limiting login attempts and enabling 2FA

✅ Result

The issue was patched in 3 days. Logging was added, and the app now uses rotating JWTs with proper validation. The SaaS provider also conducted a follow-up audit for other endpoints.

Impact Avoided: Potential account takeovers of over 14,000 enterprise users, including sensitive financial access.

Pro Tip: Always validate session tokens on the backend and implement brute-force protection. Assume tokens will be tested by attackers.

1. 🛰️ Amass

The king of subdomain enumeration. Amass performs passive + active recon, DNS enumeration, and brute-forcing to map large attack surfaces.

2. 🌐 Subfinder

Lightweight and super fast. Subfinder is great for passive subdomain discovery, often used with tools like httpx or dnsx.

3. 💥 Nuclei

Powered by templates, Nuclei helps automate vulnerability scanning for misconfigurations, CVEs, exposures, etc. You can also write your own templates!

4. 🦊 FFUF (Fuzz Faster U Fool)

A blazing fast fuzzer for directories, parameters, and more. Perfect for hidden admin panels, bypasses, and endpoint discovery.

5. 🧪 Burp Suite Community

While not fully open-source, Burp Community + free extensions like Logger++, Param Miner, and Collaborator Everywhere make it a beast for manual testing.

Pro Tip: Chain these tools together in your recon automation script. A well-built pipeline = more bugs found in less time.

🎯 Bonus Insight: Why SaaS Startups Need Pentesting from Day 1

Most SaaS founders ignore security in early stages — big mistake. 60%+ of successful breaches target startups due to lack of protections:

• They use fast MVPs, not secure code.
• Often expose APIs, S3 buckets, or debug ports accidentally.
• No access control, weak tokens, and missing logs are common.

Solution: Conduct regular pentesting, even with small budgets. Open-source tooling + skilled vendors like HVSec can cover major gaps.

🧪 The Test Scenario

During a mobile API assessment, we noticed the login flow used OTP-based authentication without proper backend validation. The endpoint looked like:

POST /api/auth/verify_otp
Body: { "mobile": "9xxxxxxxxx", "otp": "123456" }
    

However, the OTP value wasn’t actually being checked against a server-side record — it was client-verified!

🛠️ Exploit Steps

• Registered a test number and captured the OTP call in Burp Suite
• Replaced the OTP with 000000 and still got a valid auth token
• Tried the same with other user phone numbers — worked on all

📦 Impact

- Unauthorized access to shipment tracking, addresses, invoices
- Potential rerouting of deliveries via backend APIs
- Business clients’ contact lists and shipping data exposed

🔐 Root Cause

• OTP was being “validated” in the mobile app only (frontend trust)
• No expiry or attempt limit implemented on the backend
• Authorization token issued purely on phone number

✅ Fix & Prevention

• Always validate OTPs server-side and enforce expiry
• Rate-limit OTP attempts and log abuse patterns
• Bind session tokens to validated OTP & device fingerprint

Conclusion: OTP is not inherently secure — without backend enforcement, it’s just UI fluff. Your API must never trust the client blindly.

💼 What is VAPT?

Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing (VAPT) is a structured, time-bound security audit performed by professionals who follow a predefined scope. It’s ideal for getting a formal, in-depth review of your app or network.

• ✅ NDA, contract, and defined scope
• ✅ Detailed report with PoC and remediation
• ✅ Often needed for compliance (ISO, SOC2, PCI-DSS)

🕵️‍♂️ What is Bug Bounty?

Bug bounty allows freelance researchers to report real-world vulnerabilities in return for rewards. It can be ongoing and crowdsourced.

• ✅ Great for finding edge-case bugs
• ✅ Pay-per-bug model
• ⚠️ Requires in-house triaging and security maturity

🤔 Which Should a Startup Choose?

Choose VAPT if:

• You are in early stages or haven't done structured testing
• You need documented reports for investors or clients
• You want fast and accountable remediation support

Choose Bug Bounty if:

• You already have internal security processes
• You are able to triage and respond to multiple researcher submissions
• You want continuous, public-facing testing after VAPT

📊 Comparison Table

Feature	VAPT	Bug Bounty
Cost Model	Fixed per project	Pay per valid bug
Control & Scope	High (customized)	Low (public scope)
Timeframe	Time-bound	Ongoing
Use Case	Initial & compliance testing	Advanced, continuous testing

💡 Final Verdict

Startups should begin with structured VAPT to fix foundational flaws. Once matured, you can complement security with a private or public bug bounty program.

Tip: Start with VAPT from HVSec. Once you're patched up, we can help you launch a safe bounty program too.