Thick Client Penetration Testing
Thick client applications often hold the keys to sensitive business functions, yet many remain untested against modern attack techniques. Packetlabs’ Thick Client Penetration Test examines your desktop apps the way an adversary would: probing for misconfigurations, insecure communication channels, local privilege escalation flaws, and weak encryption. By exposing these risks before attackers do, we give your team the visibility to harden a critical part of your environment.
Your three-step path to desktop-based software security:
1. Replicate Real-World Threats: Go beyond automated scans with a 95% manual approach, replicating realistic attack scenarios that mirror the tactics of today’s sophisticated adversaries.
2. Validate Critical Weaknesses: Evaluate your desktop-based software to find and validate critical weaknesses before attackers can exploit them. Every vulnerability is mapped to potential business impact, helping you prioritize fixes that matter most.
3. Deliver Strategic Guidance: Receive clear, tailored recommendations to assist your development and security teams. From remediation steps to best practices, ensuring you're equipped to strengthen defenses and stay ahead of evolving threats.
Actionable insights that harden your application against real threats.
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Your three-step path to desktop-based software security:
1. Replicate Real-World Threats: Go beyond automated scans with a 95% manual approach, replicating realistic attack scenarios that mirror the tactics of today’s sophisticated adversaries.
2. Validate Critical Weaknesses: Evaluate your desktop-based software to find and validate critical weaknesses before attackers can exploit them. Every vulnerability is mapped to potential business impact, helping you prioritize fixes that matter most.
3. Deliver Strategic Guidance: Receive clear, tailored recommendations to assist your development and security teams. From remediation steps to best practices, ensuring you're equipped to strengthen defenses and stay ahead of evolving threats.
Actionable insights that harden your application against real threats.
Service Highlights
Binary Analysis & Reverse Engineering
We decompile and reverse-engineer thick client binaries to uncover hidden functionality, hardcoded secrets, and flawed logic that attackers could weaponize. Why it matters: Sensitive logic buried in compiled code often bypasses security reviews. Exposing it early ensures attackers can’t exploit business-critical functionality hiding in plain sight.
The Packetlabs Commitment
Customized Threat Model
A generic threat model often wastes time on theoretical or irrelevant attack vectors. By aligning the model with your specific application use cases, you focus directly on the threats most likely to affect your business.
Manual Discovery
Every organization operates differently, and vulnerabilities that are catastrophic in one environment may be irrelevant in another. By tailoring manual testing to your execution model (namely how code is deployed, how integrations work, and how users interact with your system) you wasted time on fixing low-risk issues and ensure effort is spent where it delivers the greatest security ROI.
Reproducible Proof of Concept
A reproducible PoC transforms a vulnerability from an abstract security finding into a concrete, demonstrable risk. Without a clear PoC, security and development teams can end up in cycles of “cannot reproduce” disputes, which slow down remediation; and, when tied to a business impact narrative (e.g., “An attacker could exfiltrate customer payment data using these exact steps”), PoCs bridge the gap between technical details and executive decision-making.
In-Depth Reports
Many regulatory frameworks (such as, but not limited to, ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS, and HIPAA) require evidence of both governance-level oversight and technical remediation capability. The executive summary serves as a governance artifact, showing leadership engagement, risk acknowledgment, and strategic planning; meanwhile, our provided technical report serves as proof of detailed, reproducible testing, showcasing that findings were validated, documented, and remediated in a structured way.
Complimentary Retesting
Remediation advisory ensures your team has expert guidance on exactly how to address the vulnerabilities found, tailored to your environment, tech stack, and operational constraints. It bridges the gap between identifying problems and implementing effective solutions, thereby removing ambiguity that could lead to incomplete fixes. Meanwhile, complimentary retesting verifies that the applied fixes work as intended, confirming the threat is neutralized and hasn’t introduced new risks.
Why Invest in Thick Client Penetration Testing?
Assess the Local Attack Surface of Privileged Applications
Identify Exploitable IPC or DLL Injection Risks
Reveal Gaps in Data-at-Rest and Data-in-Memory Protections
Improve the Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL)
Resources
Pentest Sourcing Guide
Download our Pentest Sourcing Guide to learn everything you need to know to successfully plan, scope, and execute your penetration testing projects.
Download GuideRelated Posts
October 13 - Blog
The Pros and Cons of Vendor Rotation for Penetration Testing
Our ethical hackers cover the pros and cons of vendor rotation for penetration testing in today's blog.
December 09 - Blog
Third-Party Risk Management
Third-party Risk Management continues to be a challenging task, and it is now more important than ever to take it seriously.
July 24 - Blog
What Are the Elements of High-Quality Penetration Testing?
What are the elements of high-quality penetration testing? Our team of ethical hackers details how to differentiate high-quality vs. low-quality tests, and when to opt for pentesting over a VA scan.
