Server Security Assessment

We begin from an assumed foothold inside one component of your architecture - a compromised web process, a container running application code, a single VPS - agreed with you in advance, and ask what an attacker confined there can actually break out of. The encapsulation that separates one service from the next is, on most servers, a software boundary rather than a hardware one, and it is only as strong as its configuration. Containers in particular share the host kernel: their isolation is a matter of namespaces, cgroups, dropped capabilities, and seccomp or mandatory-access-control profiles, any of which can be loosened into an escape route. We test for the classic breakouts - a mounted container runtime socket that hands an attacker the host, a privileged container or one granted dangerous capabilities such as CAP_SYS_ADMIN, host paths bound into the container, shared host namespaces, and the runtime vulnerabilities that periodically affect runc and containerd - as well as the simpler failure of running application code as root where a daemonless, rootless runtime such as Podman would have contained it. Where you run an orchestrator such as Kubernetes, we extend this to the layer above: automatically mounted service-account tokens, over-permissive RBAC, privileged pods, and the path from a single compromised pod to the node and the cluster beyond.

Reaching the host as an unprivileged user is rarely the end of the story, because the user a service runs as is seldom the user an attacker wants to be. We assess local privilege escalation on the systems in scope: misconfigured sudo rules, SUID and SGID binaries, over-broad Linux capabilities, writable units and cron jobs, exploitable PATH and library-loading behaviour, world-writable files in sensitive places, exposed kernels with known local exploits, misconfigured network shells. Just as important is what each service runs as in the first place - applications with excess authority, such as a web application running as root, provide an escalation pathway if there is any way at all that the application can be exploited, or that the operating system can be misled as to where the application's binary lives. We thus assess permissions and mandatory access control policies of applications on your servers - as set by systemd, SELinux or AppArmor, Docker, and more - for violations of the principle of least authority. Our approach to privilege escalation and living off the land is always from an attacker's-eye vantage point.

This is where a Server Security Assessment most clearly departs from a Network Infrastructure Assessment. Network segmentation - firewalls, subnets, VLANs - is only one of the barriers between a foothold and the rest of your estate, and frequently not the one that fails. An attacker who lands in your web service does not need to cross a VLAN to reach your database if the database credentials are sitting in that service's environment, if the database accepts any connection from the application's subnet, or if a single shared credential unlocks half your services at once. Services on your network that interact through local IPC may not utilise the network at all. Most of all, the best network segmentation in the world does not stop an attack spreading from one remote host to others if the vector the attack happens through is a hijacked legitimate one, spreading through abusing genuine internal APIs.

We map the trust that actually exists between your services at the software level: how, and whether, services authenticate to one another; where secrets live and how far they sprawl across environment variables, configuration files, mounted volumes, and process memory; which internal APIs, caches, and message queues are reachable without authentication on the assumption that the network is friendly; and whether reused SSH keys, agent forwarding, or cached cloud credentials let a foothold on one host become access to many. On a hosted server, the metadata endpoint is a particular prize - a single request to it can yield the instance's own cloud credentials, which is where this assessment hands off to our Cloud and Identity Assessment.

All of this serves the attacker's actual goal: the safe. We assess how close a foothold really sits to the data that matters, and how much it would yield. A database that the application connects to as a superuser turns any application compromise into total data compromise; one that enforces least privilege per service contains the damage. We examine whether databases and object stores are reachable far more widely than they need to be, whether data is encrypted at rest in a way that survives the theft of a single host, and - because an attacker who reaches your backups can both exfiltrate everything at once and destroy your ability to recover - whether your backup storage and its credentials are reachable from the very systems an attacker would compromise first. The recurring question is not whether the data exists, but how many independent things must go wrong before an attacker holds it.

An attacker who breaches your servers is not simply after gaining access to your data - they likely wish to do so without drawing attention to their activities. The first step in a real attack post-breach is likely to turn a brittle, unreliable RCE pathway into a reverse shell or bind shell that provides greater persistence, reliability, and stealth. A core concern for post-exploitation security of your servers is thus detecting the earliest steps an attacker would take post-exploitation, so that a response can lock systems down before critical data has been breached. We thus test whether process execution inside your containers, authentication events, and host-level activity are captured by tooling such as auditd or eBPF-based runtime monitoring, or whether a compromise would unfold invisibly.

You receive a realistic account of how far an attacker reaches from an initial foothold on your servers - which boundaries hold, which give way, and the specific path from one compromised component to the data or control that represents real harm. Our recommendations address software-level containment - service authentication, secrets management, privilege separation, runtime and host hardening - rather than network controls alone, and where you would rather the hardening were done than merely described, our Security Engineering service can carry it out. For a view that begins outside your estate and carries a single foothold all the way to a business objective across it, this assessment sits alongside our Breach Impact Assessment.