Cybersecurity & Audits
Penetration testing, security audits, and threat modelling by senior practitioners. OWASP Top 10, API fuzzing, cloud hardening — for SaaS, fintech, and regulated industries.
01 — Approach
How we engage.
Cybersecurity engagements built around real attackers, not checklists.
SimplyRem runs penetration tests, application security audits, threat modelling sessions, and cloud security reviews for product teams who would rather find their issues before someone else does. Every engagement is led by a senior security practitioner with offensive-side experience — OSCP, OSWE, Burp Suite Certified Practitioner, or equivalent — paired with the engineering depth to give you fixes, not just findings. No reseller-style "automated scan + PDF". No vulnerabilities buried in CVSS 4.0 jargon.
What we audit
- Web application penetration testing — OWASP Top 10, business logic abuse, authentication and session attacks, IDOR / BOLA, SSRF, deserialisation, and the long tail of app-layer bugs scanners miss.
- API security testing — REST, GraphQL, gRPC. Authentication, rate-limit and quota bypasses, mass assignment, BOLA / BFLA, and structured fuzzing of every endpoint.
- Cloud security audits — AWS, GCP, Azure. IAM mis-configurations, public buckets, exposed metadata services, lateral-movement paths, secrets in CI, and a written remediation roadmap.
- Mobile application penetration testing — iOS and Android. SSL pinning bypass, insecure storage, exposed deep links, jailbreak / root detection review, Frida instrumentation.
- Source code security review — manual review of authentication, authorisation, crypto, file uploads, and data handling. SAST tuning so the noise stops drowning the signal.
- Threat modelling workshops — STRIDE-led sessions producing a documented threat model, abuse cases, and a prioritised mitigation backlog you can ship.
- SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / HIPAA readiness — gap analysis, policy authoring, evidence collection plan, and pre-audit hardening so the auditor's findings list is short.
- Incident response & forensics — retained-hours response for breaches, suspected compromises, and the morning-after rebuild work.
Why teams choose our cybersecurity services
- Senior-only delivery. A staff-level practitioner runs the engagement — not a junior with a Burp Suite licence and a template report.
- Fixes, not just findings. Every report includes reproducible PoCs, a recommended fix, and (where useful) a pull request against your code. Our practitioners are engineers first.
- Threat-model led, not checklist led. We start from how your product would actually be attacked — not from a generic list of every CVE ever filed.
- Plain-English reporting. Findings are written for two audiences: executives who need the risk in one paragraph, and engineers who need the fix on the same page.
- Compliance-aware. Findings are tagged to OWASP, CWE, NIST, MITRE ATT&CK, and the relevant SOC 2 / ISO control — so they map cleanly into your existing programme.
- Retest included. Every paid engagement includes a free retest of remediated findings within 90 days. We are not in the business of selling you the same finding twice.
- Stay-on retainers. Most clients keep us on a monthly retainer covering ongoing review, release-tied retests, threat-model updates, and the slow steady work of keeping a security programme alive.
Black-box, grey-box, or white-box — what should you choose?
We are agnostic, and we will tell you honestly. Black-box testing (no credentials, no code) is right when you want to simulate an external attacker and budget realistically — useful for compliance, less useful for finding deep bugs. Grey-box (test accounts, architecture diagram, no source) is the engagement we recommend most often: it produces the highest defect density per dollar. White-box (full source, architecture, credentials) is right when you need depth of coverage for a sensitive release — high-stakes fintech, healthcare, or pre-IPO product launches.
Our cybersecurity engagement process
1. Scoping (3–5 days)
We map your attack surface — applications, APIs, cloud accounts, mobile apps, third-party integrations — and write a fixed-scope statement of work with rules of engagement, in-scope assets, and an explicit out-of-scope list. No surprises mid-test.
2. Reconnaissance & threat modelling
STRIDE-led threat modelling of the in-scope system. Attack surface mapping, authentication boundary identification, and the abuse cases most likely to deliver a finding worth shipping.
3. Manual testing (1–4 weeks)
Two senior practitioners. Burp Suite Pro on every web target, Frida on every mobile target, manual review of every authentication boundary. Daily check-ins with a running findings log — you see issues as they surface, not at the end.
4. Reporting
Executive summary, prioritised findings list, reproducible PoCs, recommended fixes, and OWASP / CWE / NIST mappings. Delivered as a written report and a 60-minute walkthrough with your engineering team.
5. Retest & close-out
Free retest of remediated findings within 90 days. A clean retest report you can hand to your auditor, your board, or your enterprise customer's security team.
The cybersecurity toolset we ship
- Web & API testing: Burp Suite Pro, OWASP ZAP, ffuf, Nuclei, Postman, custom Python tooling.
- Mobile testing: Frida, Objection, MobSF, apktool, Hopper, Ghidra.
- SAST / supply chain: Semgrep, CodeQL, Snyk, Trivy, Syft, Cosign, GitHub Advanced Security.
- Cloud: ScoutSuite, Prowler, Pacu, Wiz, AWS Security Hub, GCP Security Command Center.
- Secrets & identity: HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Doppler, Okta / Auth0 review.
- Exploitation: Metasploit, BloodHound for AD environments, custom payload development where the engagement calls for it.
Who we work with
Our cybersecurity clients are typically Series A–D startups preparing for SOC 2 or a security-led enterprise sale, fintechs and healthtechs with real compliance pressure, and product teams inside established companies who need an external senior perspective on a flagship release. We do our best work when the brief is concrete — a specific release, a specific compliance deadline, a specific concern — and the team on the other side is prepared to actually fix what we find.
Engagement models & pricing
- Penetration test — $25k–$120k, two to six weeks. Web, API, mobile, or cloud. Fixed scope, signed rules of engagement, retest included.
- Threat modelling workshop — $15k–$30k, one to two weeks. Two-day workshop plus documented threat model and prioritised mitigation backlog.
- SOC 2 / ISO 27001 readiness — $40k–$120k, four to twelve weeks. Gap analysis, policy authoring, evidence collection plan, pre-audit hardening.
- Security retainer — monthly, $10k–$40k. Release-tied retests, ongoing review, threat-model updates, on-demand consult, and named on-call practitioner.
- Incident response retainer — annual, $25k base. Pre-negotiated rates and SLA-backed response hours when something goes wrong.
We are booking new cybersecurity engagements one quarter at a time. Tell us what you need tested — we respond to every brief within one business day, with NDA and rules of engagement enclosed.
02 — What's included
Every engagement ships with.
Senior lead
A 10+-year practitioner who stays on the work, end-to-end.
Design system
A scalable foundation, not screen-by-screen one-offs.
Production deploys
Fortnightly increments to a staging URL.
Documentation
Runbooks, ADRs, and onboarding materials.
03 — Process
Four phases. Always.
Discovery
1–2 weeks. Audit, listen, scope.
Design
2–4 weeks. Prototypes you can click.
Build
6–16 weeks. Two-week cadences.
Stewardship
Ongoing. Continuity beats handoff.
04 — Common questions
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does a penetration test cost?
A focused web or API penetration test from SimplyRem starts at $25,000 (two weeks, one senior practitioner). Larger or higher-criticality engagements with multiple targets, cloud scope, or compliance reporting run $60,000–$120,000 over four to six weeks. We publish honest ranges because we would rather discuss scope on the first call than weeks into a proposal cycle.
How long does a penetration test take?
A focused web or API test runs two to three weeks of testing plus one week of reporting. Threat modelling workshops are one to two weeks. SOC 2 / ISO 27001 readiness work runs four to twelve weeks depending on starting maturity. Free retest of remediated findings is within 90 days of the original report.
Black-box, grey-box, or white-box — which should we pick?
Grey-box is what we recommend most often — it produces the highest defect density per dollar. Black-box is right when you want to simulate an external attacker (useful for compliance, less useful for depth). White-box is right when you need maximum coverage for a sensitive release — high-stakes fintech, healthcare, or pre-IPO launches. We will tell you honestly on the scoping call.
Do you provide fixes, or only a list of findings?
Both. Every finding includes a reproducible PoC and a recommended fix, written for the engineer who will implement it. Where useful, we will open a pull request against your code with the fix already applied. Our practitioners are engineers first — a finding without a fix path is half an engagement.
Can you help us pass SOC 2 or ISO 27001?
Yes — readiness engagements are a regular practice. We do gap analysis against the relevant controls, author the policies, build an evidence-collection plan, and run the technical hardening (logging, access review, vulnerability management, change control) before the auditor arrives. We do not certify — that is the auditor — but we get teams to a short findings list.
Do you test mobile apps, or only web and API?
Both — iOS and Android mobile pen-testing is a core practice. SSL pinning bypass, insecure storage review, deep-link exposure, jailbreak / root detection, Frida instrumentation, and binary analysis are all in scope. We handle the App Store / Play Store re-submission risk too — testing under TestFlight or internal track when the production binary cannot be touched.
Can you respond if we have already had a breach?
Yes — incident response retainers are available. Pre-negotiated rates, an NDA on file, named on-call practitioners, and SLA-backed response hours mean you do not have to do procurement at 3 AM. For organisations without a retainer in place, we will still respond on a best-effort basis, but a retained relationship gets you faster and cheaper coverage.
Do you offer ongoing security review after the test?
Yes. Most clients keep us on a monthly security retainer covering release-tied retests, ongoing code review, threat-model updates, on-demand consult, and a named on-call practitioner. A pen test is a snapshot — a retainer is a programme. The compounding value is real.
05 — Selected work
Related projects.
— From the journal