CASE STUDY
14 Critical Vulnerabilities Closed in 30 Days: Proactive Application Security Saves a National Insurer from a Costly Breach
Key Results
| Critical Findings | Identified 14 high-severity vulnerabilities across the claims application layer |
| Risk Exposure | Prevented potential exposure of sensitive PII across tens of millions of policyholder records |
| Time to Remediation | 100% of critical findings addressed within 30-day remediation sprint |
| Ongoing Posture | Shifted client from reactive patching to continuous security validation lifecycle |
SERVICE AREA
INDUSTRY
CHALLENGE
Exploitable vulnerabilities hiding inside a high-volume claims workflow
A large-scale national insurer (across general insurance, life, and specialty) grew its claims technology stack “organically” for more than a decade. As such, there is a substantial application environment where applications are deeply integrated to each other, reliant on many third-party vendors, and contain all manner of business rules that have not been evaluated from an overall security perspective. However, with increasing volumes of claims and new regulations regarding protecting consumer’s personal identifiable information, the senior management team recognized that while they may be able to avoid problems with their current systems today, future issues could potentially be brewing beneath the surface. In short, this large national insurer required a partner to evaluate the company’s application layer as a functional system and also as a potential point of entry for a malicious attacker. Additionally, the senior management team did not want to disrupt their claims operations, nor did they wish to introduce additional compliance risks through the evaluation process.
SOLUTION
Embedded application security assessment and proactive risk remediation
For this solution, SCIGON embedded a security assessment group into the client’s development & operations workflow as part of a structured engagement addressing application security, penetration testing, and identity access review throughout their claims platform. Instead of being an isolated scan-and-report process, our team assessed the entire attack surface – including all authentication flows; all API endpoints; data handling practices; third-party integrations; privilege escalation paths – relative to a combination of OWASP standards and sector-specific regulatory requirements. In real time, the team triaged the results, with critical and high-severity issues immediately escalated to the client’s internal security and engineering leads.
For the remediation sprint, we worked alongside the client development team through the process of verifying fixes and re-testing impacted components to confirm closure. Upon conclusion of the engagement, the team provided a hardened configuration of the application, a documented security baseline, and a prioritized roadmap for ongoing validation – shifting the client’s security posture from reactive incident response to proactive risk management built into their development lifecycle.