Services

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

Detecting and Protecting Against Insider Attacks

Our Uncompromising Standards.

CREST-Accredited Expertise

You, your leadership, and your team can’t afford guesswork; but need trust and proof that the people testing your defenses meet the highest standards. That’s why Packetlabs earned CREST-accreditation, cybersecurity’s gold standard, awarded only after rigorous, hands‑on exams and ongoing audits by the Council of Registered Security Testers.

Beyond Automated Testing

While automated scanners can uncover simple surface-level findings, Packetlabs’ expert-led manual-first penetration tests probe the logic, business workflows, and chained exploits that scanners routinely overlook. Leveraging manual exploitation techniques, threat-intel-driven scenarios, and creative lateral thinking, our team exposes high-impact vulnerabilities competitors miss and translates them into clear, fix-ready guidance.

In-Depth Methodologies

Our Penetration Testing methodologies are derived from the SANS Pentest Methodology, the MITRE ATT&CK framework for enterprises, and NIST SP800-115 to ensure compliance with the majority of critical regulatory requirements. Why? To guarantee a thoroughness that 100% automated testing can't deliver.

Defence In-Depth

Packetlabs has assisted security leaders worldwide in defending against breaches. Testing like an adversary, our experts go beyond the initial target, pivoting through every in-scope system to stress-test your detection layers so you can see exactly how your “defense in depth” holds up. The result: not a single client has ever been compromised by a vulnerability we missed, providing you with board-ready proof that your organization is well-defended.

Why Invest in Thick Client Penetration Testing?

Reveal Gaps in Data-at-Rest and Data-in-Memory Protections

Thick Client Penetration Testing is uniquely positioned to uncover weaknesses that traditional network or web application testing cannot reach, particularly around how sensitive data is handled locally on the endpoint. Since many thick client applications run directly on user workstations or administrative consoles, they interact closely with the host operating system, local storage, memory, and sometimes hardware-based encryption modules.

This deep integration often introduces opportunities for attackers to harvest credentials, confidential data, or cryptographic secrets simply by compromising the local environment.

Assess the Local Attack Surface of Privileged Applications

This assessment extends far beyond network scans: it examines how an application interacts with the host operating system, the resources it trusts, how it stores secrets, and which local integrations could facilitate privilege escalation or lateral movement.

Testing begins with a comprehensive discovery and inventory phase. Testers enumerate binaries, installed services/daemons, scheduled tasks, autostart entries, drivers, and any companion processes. This inventory establishes a baseline of sensitive artifacts and trust boundaries on the host, revealing components that run with elevated privileges or have broad network access, critical starting points for attack-path construction.

Identify Exploitable IPC or DLL Injection Risks

Privileged desktop applications frequently rely on local inter-process communication (IPC) channels and dynamically loaded libraries to coordinate functionality. When they lack proper authentication, input validation, or access control, they become reliable footholds for attackers to inject code, escalate privileges, or pivot laterally.

Testing for these risks begins with a comprehensive inventory of IPC endpoints and dynamic-loading behavior. Testers enumerate listening sockets, named pipes, registered COM classes, D-Bus services, launch agents, and any local HTTP/WebSocket endpoints the client exposes.

Improve the Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL)

Thick Client Penetration Testing plays a vital role in strengthening an organization’s Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL) by integrating real-world attack perspectives into every stage of software design, development, and deployment. Because thick client applications operate directly on user systems (often with elevated privileges, local data storage, and deep OS integration), they introduce a unique blend of application, system, and network-level risks that traditional web or API security reviews overlook.

Incorporating thick client testing into the SDL transforms security from a reactive task at release time into a continuous, measurable practice that reduces long-term risk, accelerates remediation, and improves developer awareness.

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.