SCALE SECURE
MOVE FAST.
Early architecture is still small enough to fix. We test it before the authorisation pattern you chose in year one is copied into forty services.
THE EARLY-STAGE THREAT MODEL
The architecture is still legible
This is the one genuine advantage of testing early. One service, one identity model, one cloud account, and the people who wrote it are still in the building. Findings at this stage are cheap to fix and structural. The authorisation pattern chosen now will be reimplemented in every service that follows.
Nobody owns security yet
Cloud accounts created for a demo and never closed. Admin tooling with no authorisation because everyone was trusted. Keys in environment variables shared across environments. These are not negligence, they are the residue of moving fast, and they are what an opportunistic attacker finds first.
The first enterprise buyer changes the requirement
Security becomes urgent the moment a large customer's vendor risk team sends a questionnaire, or an investor's technical diligence starts. At that point the constraint is evidence, and evidence takes as long as it takes regardless of how badly the deal is needed.
WHAT DRIVES THE REQUIREMENT
At this stage the obligation usually arrives from a counterparty, not a regulator. These are the ones that set scope.
First SOC 2 Type II
Auditors expect independent testing evidence against the controls in scope. It is usually the first external security obligation a company takes on.
Customer security review
Vendor risk teams ask for a current test report, a scope statement, and a remediation position. A summary that overstates coverage tends to fail on second reading.
Investor technical diligence
Security posture is examined alongside architecture and technical debt, particularly at Series B and beyond, and again at acquisition.
Cyber insurance and DPA commitments
Policy applications and data processing agreements frequently commit you to regular testing before anyone internally has decided to do it.
WHAT WE TEST
Product & application
- Authentication, session handling, and account recovery
- Authorisation across roles, organisations, and API surface
- Business logic abuse in the flows that move money or data
- Injection and input handling on user-controlled paths
- Admin and internal tooling, which is usually the weakest surface
Cloud & pipeline
- IAM policy review and privilege escalation paths
- Storage and database exposure across all accounts, including forgotten ones
- Secrets handling in CI, environment variables, and repositories
- Network and security group configuration
- Backup access and restoration integrity
Evidence for the deal
- Findings written so an auditor can follow scope and method
- Remediation status tracked to closure, not left open in the report
- Executive summary that survives a vendor risk review
- Control mapping for SOC 2 and ISO 27001 where in scope
- Architecture observations for the systems you are about to build
HOW WE WORK
The whole surface is worked in one pass, which is what makes a small budget reach further. A human signs the findings.
Stage-appropriate scoping
Scope against the attack surface you actually have and the obligation you actually face, whether that is a specific customer's security schedule or a first audit.
Threat modelling
For most early companies the realistic adversaries are opportunistic scanning, credential stuffing, and a curious customer, not a nation state. We test accordingly.
Agentic exploitation
Agent swarms work the whole surface in one pass, which is what makes a small budget reach further. Every finding is exploited before it is written up, with steps for the engineer who will fix it, and delivered as it is confirmed.
Evidence and retest
Reporting built for auditors, buyers and investors, with remediated findings retested.
WHAT YOU RECEIVE
WHEN SCALE-UPS BREAK
Public disclosures worth reading closely. Each one is a control that was reasonable at twenty people and indefensible at two thousand.
Uber
2016Credentials committed to a private repository gave access to a cloud storage backup containing rider and driver records.
A source control hygiene failure, not an exploit. The subsequent concealment produced the criminal liability.
Twitter internal tooling
2020Phone-based social engineering of staff yielded access to an internal admin panel able to control any account.
Internal tooling built when the company was small kept its original trust model long after that was defensible.
Mailchimp
2022-2023Repeated social engineering against support and customer-facing staff granted access to customer account data and API keys.
Support tooling is production access. Repeat incidents indicate the control gap was organisational, not technical.
23andMe
2023Credential stuffing against accounts without enforced multi-factor authentication, amplified by an opt-in data sharing feature.
A product feature multiplied the blast radius of an authentication weakness. Neither team owned the combination.
FREQUENTLY ASKED
We are pre-seed. Is testing worth it yet?+
Sometimes not. If you have no customer data, no enterprise pipeline, and no compliance obligation, your money is better spent on MFA, cloud logging, and removing the admin panel with no authorisation. We will tell you that. Testing earns its cost once real customer data or a specific deal is involved.
How do you scope for a company with a small engineering team?+
Narrowly and deliberately. Authentication, authorisation and money-moving flows tested thoroughly beats sweeping the whole surface shallowly. The scope statement records what was excluded.
Will testing slow our release cadence?+
Testing runs in parallel with development, not as a gate, and findings are shared as they are confirmed. The real cost is engineering attention during remediation. Plan for it.
What if a customer needs the report by a specific date?+
Tell us the date at scoping and we will say plainly whether it is achievable for the scope you want, and what a smaller scope would cover instead. We will not compress an engagement to a deadline and issue a report that implies more coverage than was performed.
Fix it while the architecture is still small
Tell us your stage, your stack, and what is forcing the question. If testing is not the right spend yet, we will say so.