How FloQast are streamlining testing workflows and providing actionable reporting for their developers.

Burp Suite is my go to.

Owen McCarthy, Application Security Engineer, FloQast

Software providers face the challenge of rapidly getting new features and improvements in the hands of their users, while ensuring that this agility doesn't result in vulnerable code slipping through the net. As such, it's crucial that Application Security Engineers like FloQast’s Owen McCarthy are able to find vulnerabilities and help development teams patch them effectively before they hit production.

FloQast offers accounting software to provide workflow automation and close management. We caught up with Owen about his pains when pentesting, and how Burp helps streamline his workflow.

Key highlights

Using Burp to map an application’s full attack surface.
Supercharging testing workflows with Burp’s community-powered extensibility.
Providing valuable, actionable insight for developers with Burp’s custom issue creation.

Owen’s workflow in Burp Suite Professional

Owen's main challenge as a pentester is effectively securing a broad portfolio of applications, comprising a diverse and complex range of technologies.

Throughout the Discovery, Attack, and Reporting phases of his pentesting workflow, Owen regularly uses a range of Burp Suite Professional’s built-in features and community-created extensions to help overcome these challenges.

Mapping attack surface and API request structures

While Owen utilizes external CLI tools and scripts for initial subdomain enumeration, he feeds the results of his external recon into Burp Suite. Burp provides several tools that help him to automate this process. He then uses the content discovery tool and Intruder to enumerate more attack surface.

The content discovery tool is pretty helpful at this point. I'll also run Intruder attacks where the payload position is the subdomain or end of the link.

Once he's enumerated additional subdomains, he uses Burp Scanner to automate the process of crawling the website to map out the application’s structure.

We gather a list of known subdomains and then just pass those to the crawler. We can have that running in the background to crawl more.

This automation frees him up to do some manual discovery and analysis. He uses Proxy to intercept and analyze the traffic between his browser and the target app, providing insights into the application's functionality and clues that indicate potential vulnerabilities.

While the crawl is running in the background, I can also say 'this request looks really interesting' and start manually testing.

This centralized approach streamlines the discovery process by balancing automation with detailed manual analysis.

Organizing and prioritizing findings for further investigation

Owen uses the site map to help him structure his testing. This provides a visual representation of the application's structure and offers advanced filtering based on various criteria, facilitating quick identification of interesting endpoints. When he identifies areas of the app to prioritize first, he then sends the relevant requests to Organizer and Repeater for further analysis.

He takes advantage of the built-in note-taking functionality to record what it is he wants to look into so that he can come back to it later, without needing to context-switch from what he's doing currently.

It's really helpful to be able to add a little note saying what I thought was weird about the request.

This structured approach prevents losing track of important observations during the discovery process.

Speeding up the process of probing for vulnerabilities and catching low-hanging fruit

Owen runs targeted scans on specific requests, or even individual parameters, that he suspects may be vulnerable. This maximizes his efficiency as it's much quicker than manually probing each request for every potential vulnerability.

I usually run a lot of targeted scans of requests that I think look kind of sketchy. For example, if there's a search parameter, I'll select the value and then right-click and choose to scan that specific spot. That way, I can get quick results.

He then uses the results of the scans to drive the rest of his manual testing workflow.

Unrivalled features for performing detailed manual analysis

He then experiments with the request in Repeater to try to get a deeper understanding of how the application behaves.

The Repeater is definitely my number one tool. It lets me take a request and test what happens if I modify it in a particular way. This helps me to almost see under the hood of the application. That's pretty huge.

The Inspector also simplifies this process by helping Owen work with encoded data in requests and responses without having to switch to another tool.

Fuzzing at scale, without writing a single line of code

Once Owen feels that he might be onto something, he likes using Intruder to perform this kind of probing at scale, resending the request over and over, fuzzing controllable inputs to detect interesting behavior and trying lots of variations of potential payloads to see how the application responds.

Intruder is really helpful for this because it means I don't have to spend hours setting up a whole Python script, which may not even find anything. It's really nice to just be able to go 'Here is a list of 100 things to try' and just run through them real quick without having to worry about it too much.

This combination enables Owen to efficiently test different attack vectors and approaches for bypassing security mechanisms and confirm the exploitability of potential weaknesses.

Out-of-the-box detection of otherwise 'invisible' vulnerabilities

Owen uses Burp Collaborator , an out-of-the-box solution for hunting for asynchronous or 'invisible' vulnerabilities. Developed in conjunction with the world-class PortSwigger Research team, Collaborator provides a client and server that enable you to easily detect these vulnerabilities by inducing the target to make unintended outbound interactions with an arbitrary external system.

Collaborator is a huge one. I use it a lot. It's super helpful to be able to quickly see if there's an SSRF vulnerability in the background, where the app will make a request to any URL you provide.

He combines this with James Kettle's Collaborator Everywhere extension, which automatically injects Collaborator payloads into a variety of headers and other inputs.

It tosses a payload into practically every input and then I can just see what comes back.

Customizable extensibility, powered by the community

Owen uses a number of community-created extensions to add support when working with specific technologies or testing for specialist attack vectors.

The customizability and extensibility is really helpful if you're testing a target that has a different tech stack, there are extensions you can grab that are specific to that. Burp doesn't make it cumbersome like a lot of other software.

He also loves being able to quickly create custom scan checks, known as BChecks , to search for specific vulnerabilities, enhancing the effectiveness and accuracy of scans:

There's a ton of BChecks that I use. They're my go-to if I need to quickly come up with passive or active scan checks. They're really helpful.

Overall, he loves that Burp simplifies this workflow, while still providing enough granular control for when you need it.

It kind of hides the difficult stuff but still makes it available if you want to get into something really advanced.

Automated report generation to help present findings to development teams

Although Owen and his team manually craft reports, they still take advantage of Burp's automated reporting features to save time and provide a consistent reporting format.

It's super useful to grab the example requests from the scan report. These contain the payload used and mean I don't have to go to Repeater and make an example request myself.

The ability to manually create an issue in Burp Suite, providing your own detailed description and remediation advice, helps Owen provide valuable context for developers and improves the efficiency of remediation.

A comprehensive toolkit designed to work with complex applications

For Owen and the team at FloQast, Burp Suite simplifies otherwise complex tasks and provides a comprehensive platform for web application penetration testing. Its customizable nature, extensibility, and powerful features like Repeater, Intruder, and targeted scanning significantly improve their efficiency and mitigate the pains they experience during various stages of pentesting.

80,000 pentesters worldwide, like Owen, are currently using Burp Suite Professional to optimize their security testing. Join them by requesting a fully-featured free trial of the web security tester's toolkit of choice .