The Challenge
The client is a fintech that had grown quickly from a small product team into a business handling significant transaction volume. Engineering velocity had been the priority and had served the company well, but the security posture had not kept pace with the responsibility the company now carried.
The immediate pressure came from partners. Banking relationships and payment processors conduct meaningful due diligence, and the fintech was facing a partner security review it was not confident it would pass. Beyond that lay the underlying concern: the company now moved other people's money and its founders understood what a serious incident would mean for a business whose entire value rested on trust.
Our Approach
StrikeCyber assessed the three areas where a company at this stage typically carries the most risk, working at a pace that matched the engineering team's release cycle rather than blocking it.
- Application and API penetration testing against the customer-facing product and the internal administrative tooling, which is frequently weaker and more dangerous.
- Cloud configuration and identity review, covering the permission model, secrets handling and separation between production and non-production environments.
- Assessment of the software supply chain, including dependency risk, CI/CD pipeline permissions and how deployment credentials were held.
Findings were delivered continuously rather than in a single report at the end, so the team could remediate in parallel with testing and be measurably further along by the time the partner review arrived.
What We Found
- Weak controls on internal tooling. The administrative interface used by support staff allowed broader account access than any single role required and lacked meaningful audit logging.
- Production and staging insufficiently separated. Credentials valid in the staging environment were also valid in production, and a copy of production data had been used to populate a staging database.
- Over-permissive deployment credentials. The CI/CD pipeline held credentials with administrative reach into the production cloud environment, available to any workflow in the repository.
- Dependency risk unmanaged. Several third-party libraries carried known vulnerabilities, and no process existed to learn about new ones.
The Outcome
The team rebuilt the administrative tooling around granular roles with full audit logging, which closed both the access and accountability problems. Production and staging were separated properly, with distinct credentials and synthetic rather than copied data. Deployment credentials were scoped down to what each workflow actually needed and moved behind environment protection rules.
Dependency scanning was added to the pipeline with a defined process for triage. The fintech cleared its partner security review, and the report gave it a credible answer to the same questions from subsequent partners and enterprise customers.
Why It Matters
Fast-growing companies accumulate security debt in predictable places: internal tooling nobody tests, environments that were separate in principle, and deployment pipelines holding more privilege than any human account. None of it is negligence; it is what shipping quickly looks like. The point at which it must be addressed is when the business starts holding something that matters, and in fintech that point arrives early. To assess your product and cloud environment, get in touch.