Automated vulnerability scanners have their place — but they consistently miss the vulnerabilities that actually lead to breaches. In our experience across 500+ enterprise engagements, automated tools catch roughly 40% of exploitable vulnerabilities. The remaining 60% require something tools fundamentally lack: human judgment, business context, and an attacker's creativity.
This is why Simuna Infosec built a rigorous, 16-step VAPT methodology — refined over 7 years of securing Fortune 500 manufacturers, Tier-1 telecom operators, and major banking institutions across four continents.
Why 16 Steps?
Most VAPT firms advertise a 4- or 5-phase process: scan, test, report, done. The reality is that meaningful security testing requires much deeper structure. Each of our 16 steps exists because we've seen what happens when it's skipped.
Phase 1: Context & Reconnaissance (Steps 01–04)
Before a single packet is sent, we invest significant time understanding your application's business logic, user roles, and data flows. This is the step most automated services skip entirely — and it's the reason they miss business-logic vulnerabilities.
**Application Familiarization** involves mapping how your application actually works from a business perspective. What are the critical transaction flows? Where does money move? What role-based access controls exist? This context is what separates a finding like "XSS on page 47" from "an attacker can escalate from a customer role to an administrator and approve their own wire transfers."
**Reconnaissance and Information Gathering** use both passive and active techniques to map your full attack surface — subdomains, API endpoints, technology stacks, and architectural patterns.
**Pre-scan Analysis** customizes our tooling to your specific environment, ensuring optimal coverage without triggering false alarms or causing service disruption.
Phase 2: Structural Probing & Filtering (Steps 05–08)
This is where automation plays its proper role — as a starting point, not an endpoint. We spider your application to discover every endpoint, run tailored automated scans, then do something most firms skip: we manually validate every single automated finding.
**False Positive Removal** is critical. An automated scanner might flag 200 issues. After manual review, 60 are false positives, 80 are informational, and 60 are real. Delivering the raw 200 wastes your development team's time and erodes trust in the testing process. Our clients receive zero false positives.
Phase 3: Human-Led Deep Dive (Steps 09–12)
This is where Simuna's testing fundamentally diverges from automated services. Our experts perform static and dynamic analysis, then execute two rounds of manual testing: one against industry benchmarks (OWASP Top 10, CWE Top 25), and one using proprietary, in-house test cases developed from our experience across telecom platforms, fintech systems, and enterprise applications.
These in-house test cases target the complex business-logic patterns that no commercial scanner can evaluate — billing bypass, transaction manipulation, race conditions in payment flows, and privilege escalation through multi-step workflows.
Phase 4: Exploitation, Validation & Governance (Steps 13–16)
We don't just find vulnerabilities — we prove them. Safe exploitation demonstrates the real-world impact of chained findings, turning a list of "potential issues" into a clear picture of "here is exactly what an attacker could achieve."
Senior security leadership then peer-reviews every finding before the report is delivered, ensuring absolute accuracy and actionable remediation guidance.
The Dual-Round Advantage
Every Simuna engagement includes a second verification round after your team remediates. We re-test from Reconnaissance (15 steps), confirming that fixes hold and no regressions were introduced during patching. This isn't an add-on — it's built into the engagement.
The Bottom Line
A 16-step methodology isn't about complexity for its own sake. It's about leaving no gaps — because attackers don't skip steps, and neither should your security testing partner.